Alphabet, the parent company of Google, stated on Wednesday night, January 2024, that it has fired off hundreds of staff worldwide in order to save costs.
Mandy News, your trusted source for news and information, contacted the company to inquire about the impact on the Nigerian team and we are awaiting a response.
According to information obtained by mandynews.com from the Reuters agency, Google will continue to lay off “hundreds of people” in its voice assistant unit (Google Assistant), augmented reality, and the hardware team, which is in charge of Pixel cell phones, Nest line (high -smart speaker), and Fitbit (smart watch).
The search engine giant revealed that many roles in the core technical team are also affected.
Fitbit co-founders James Park and Eric Friedman are both quitting the firm. Google paid US$2.1 billion for Fitbit, a health and fitness monitoring company, in 2021, but continued to release versions of its Pixel Watch, a product that competes with several Fitbit devices as well as the Apple Watch.
“During the second half of 2023, several of our teams made changes to become more efficient and work better, as well as to align their capabilities with their biggest product priorities,” a Google representative said in a statement to Reuters.
“Some continue to make these types of organizational changes, which include role eliminations around the world,” he added.
The representative did not say how many functions were affected.
Following the success of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, corporations such as Microsoft, Meta (owner of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp), and Google are betting on the expanding usage of generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies.
Google unveiled ambitions to add creative AI capabilities to its virtual assistant last year. AI would enable the assistant to help individuals plan a trip or catch up on emails before asking follow-up questions.
Google disclosed intentions to slash 12,000 positions, or 6% of its global workforce, in January 2023. Alphabet has 182,381 employees worldwide as of September 2023.
