Google has initiated a new round of workforce reductions within its cloud computing division, terminating the services of over 100 employees working in design and user experience teams. This move reflects the company’s shift towards increasing reliance on artificial intelligence and cutting costs in other areas.

According to a CNBC report, the layoffs affected specialized teams such as “Quantitative User Experience Research” and “Experience Platform and Services,” which typically gather data, conduct surveys, and study how customers use products to help engineers and designers improve them. The report noted that some of these teams were cut by half, and laid-off employees in the United States were asked to seek other roles within the company until early December.

Google has not officially commented on this step, but it is part of a series of similar measures since the beginning of the year, including voluntary exit packages offered in HR, advertising, hardware, marketing, and finance departments, as well as reductions in middle management levels by letting go of supervisors of small teams.

CEO Sundar Pichai has repeatedly emphasized that the current phase requires integrating AI tools into employees’ daily work. In an internal meeting, he said, “At this pivotal moment for AI, we must achieve more by leveraging these transformations to increase productivity, and we cannot rely solely on adding more people to get tasks done.”

This transformation comes as parent company Alphabet announced raising its capital investments for 2025 to about $85 billion instead of $75 billion, allocating most of it to building new data centers and enhancing the infrastructure needed to run advanced AI models.

However, this is not unique to Google alone; major Silicon Valley tech companies are following the same path. Microsoft laid off about 9,000 employees last July, Meta has conducted successive rounds of layoffs over the past two years, and Amazon announced plans to reduce its workforce as more tasks shift to generative AI systems.

Nevertheless, the recent cuts at Google seem particularly harsh on design and user experience teams, which have always played a pivotal role in developing the company’s products. This indicates a clear shift in priorities with AI at the core of its future strategy.

According to figures, Google’s total workforce was about 187,000 employees by last June, down from a peak of 191,000 in 2023. The company had laid off about 6% of its workforce in early 2023 and continues selective reductions.

In the latest all-hands meeting, Pichai stressed the need for significant investment while preserving company resources, saying, “We will go through a period of massive investments, but we must be more prudent and efficient, and I am very optimistic about the future.”