General Motors laid off more than 10% of its IT department (about 600 employees) and is hiring replacements with AI-focused skills

GM confirmed layoffs of more than 10% of its IT department, or about 600 salaried employees, in what the company framed as a skills swap to prepare for the future. The company is still hiring for IT roles, but specifically seeking people with AI-native development, data engineering and analytics, cloud-based engineering, agent and model development, prompt engineering, and new AI workflows capabilities.

Sterling Anderson, co-founder of autonomous trucking startup Aurora, was hired in May 2025 as chief product officer and pushed to consolidate GM's disparate technology businesses into one organization. Three top software executives departed, and the company subsequently hired Behrad Toghi (previously at Apple) in October as AI lead and Rashed Haq as vice president of autonomous vehicles (Haq spent five years at Cruise as its head of AI and robotics).

GM has undergone broader white-collar reductions over the past 18 months; in August 2024, for example, the company cut about 1,000 software workers. The restructuring signals that enterprise AI adoption involves deliberately rebuilding the workforce from the ground up rather than simply adding AI tools to existing teams.