GM cutting 500 to 600 white-collar jobs
GM is cutting tech jobs that are no longer needed, according to a source, but plans on hiring workers skilled in artificial intelligence.
General Motors Co. is cutting several hundred information technology jobs globally as it focuses on artificial intelligence and other future-forward skillsets, potentially impacting employment levels in southeast Michigan.
About 500 to 600 employees will be laid off, according to a source familiar with the matter, including some at the company’s Warren hub. GM is cutting tech jobs that are no longer needed, according to the source, but plans on hiring workers adept in AI and future technologies expected to power next-gen product development.
“GM is transforming its Information Technology organization to better position the company for the future,” according to a statement from the Detroit automaker. “As part of that work, we have made the difficult decision to eliminate certain roles globally.” GM declined to disclose the locations of the job cuts.
GM’s job cuts are the second significant layoff by a major Michigan employer in recent days. On Friday, Cincinnati-based Fifth Third Bank announced more than 500 layoffs at its Farmington Hills office, the former Comerica Bank campus it acquired in a merger earlier this year.
“The aggregate numbers aren’t enough to affect the Michigan economy,” said Patrick Anderson, CEO of Lansing-based Anderson Economic Group. “But GM is a flagship employer here, and they’re making a decision that a lot of companies in the automobile industry and other sectors are also considering. It’s definitely a warning sign for a lot of Michigan employers.”
Anderson said the auto industry “has been taking a lashing” because of tariffs, low-cost Chinese vehicles and now “the cost pressures that consumers are facing all across the board, making their discretionary purchase of automobiles a harder sell.”
“Artificial intelligence and, in particular, the tremendous growth of coding agents, is probably also a factor,” he said. The most recent round of job cuts are part of a continuing trend inside the automaker to both staff to meet market demand and to match tech skills to tech needs of the future.
In late March, GM temporarily laid off 1,300 workers at its Factory Zero electric vehicle plant on the Detroit-Hamtramck border amid slow sales of battery-powered models. Last October, GM laid off more than 200 employees, mostly at its Warren Technical Center, as well as another roughly 325 workers as it began shuttering its Georgia IT Innovation Center.
At the time, GM said some of the roughly 575 remaining Georgia employees would remain on staff through mid-2026. Most of the job cuts at the Roswell, Georgia, site were IT workers, a trend across industries as artificial intelligence becomes more advanced.
Many companies have evaluated replacing support or call center staff helping internal employees as well as customers with AI chatbots. Such efforts can be perceived as cost savings and generate Wall Street buzz, said Sam Abuelsamid, vice president of market research for auto communications firm Telemetry Agency. But he said such cuts can create more costs long-term.
“They realize the challenges with working with this stuff,” he said. “It doesn’t always work the way they expect it to, so they have to hire people back, or they have to have people that are double checking the work that AI is doing.”
One area where it might be helpful, Abuelsamid said, is back-end system development. As companies such as OpenAI Group PBC and Alphabet Inc.’s Google LLC seek profitability on AI, the tool’s ability to generate code for enterprises is a big focus. There, businesses such as GM might be able to have engineers use AI to generate code, rather than having developers write the code themselves.
“For coding assistance and support,” Abuelsamid said, “it can be more cost-effective to use AI, or as more of a tool rather than relying totally on humans.”
GM has been poaching high-paid Silicon Valley executives to lead its tech efforts, despite some internal grumbling from longtime Michigan staffers. And for their efforts to lure tech talent to GM, its top leaders have been unapologetic.
GM is “going to go to where the talent is,” Barra told The Detroit News in a 2024 interview. “It’s not to say that our people aren’t great, but if you haven’t been a software engineer and doing the type of software that is needed, you don’t have time to learn. Bringing in the right talent, wherever they are, is going to be important.”
Detroit News Staff Writer Breana Noble and Reuters contributed to this report.