GM cuts hundreds of IT workers

General Motors just made a very specific kind of cut. Not factory workers. Not a broad companywide purge. GM started laying off roughly 500 to 600 salaried IT employees on Monday, May 11, as it reworks what kind of tech talent it wants inside the company. That matters because modern car companies are software companies now — but not all software jobs are valued the same way anymore. GM isn’t simply shrinking tech. It’s trimming one set of skills while keeping the door open for another. ### What exactly happened? GM confirmed cuts across its global IT organization, with reports putting the total at about 500 to 600 salaried workers. (cnbc.com) Notifications started Monday morning. The company framed the move as part of reducing overlap, managing costs, and aligning staffing with the skills it says it needs next. ### Why IT, specifically? Because “IT” at a giant legacy company covers a lot of ground — old internal systems, enterprise support, infrastructure, business apps, and the glue that keeps huge organizations running. (cnbc.com) The shift here seems to be that GM wants less of the broad legacy-support mix and more people who can build around AI, cloud systems, data pipelines, and newer software platforms. TechCrunch described it pretty plainly as a skills swap. ### Is GM still hiring? Yes — and that’s the part that makes this more than a normal layoff story. GM still had 82 open IT positions on its careers site when CNBC reported the cuts. Those openings included work in artificial intelligence, motorsports, and autonomous vehicles. So the company is not backing away from tech hiring. It’s being choosier about which tech jobs survive. (techcrunch.com) ### How big is this inside GM? Big enough to matter, but not big enough to call existential. GM said it had about 68,000 salaried employees globally at the end of last year, including 47,000 white-collar workers in the U.S. That means these cuts hit a noticeable slice of the IT organization, but they do not amount to a wholesale retreat from salaried staffing overall. TechCrunch pegged the move at more than 10% of GM’s IT department. (cnbc.com) ### Has GM done this before? Yes — repeatedly. GM has been reevaluating salaried headcount for years, and it already cut around 1,000 software jobs in August 2024 while prioritizing vehicle software quality and AI-related work. It also made other salaried cuts in late 2025. So this week’s move looks less like a one-off shock and more like another step in an ongoing reset. (cnbc.com) ### Why does AI keep showing up here? Because AI has become the budget magnet. Companies can justify replacing broad, general-purpose internal tech roles with fewer people who are closer to automation, data systems, and product-facing software. The catch is that plenty of this work still depends on boring old enterprise plumbing. You can’t really run an “AI-native” company if the underlying systems are a mess. That makes these transitions risky even when the strategy sounds clean on paper. (techcrunch.com) ### Why should anyone outside GM care? Because this is what white-collar restructuring looks like now. The old version was simple cost-cutting. The new version is narrower — cut workers in established functions, then say the company is still hiring for “higher-skill” roles. GM is doing it in auto, but the pattern is showing up across corporate America. (techcrunch.com) ### Bottom line GM didn’t just cut jobs. It re-priced a category of work. The company still wants technologists — but increasingly the ones who can tie software to AI, data, cloud, and vehicle platforms, not just keep the old internal stack running. (cnbc.com)