General Motors Lays Off 500-600 IT Workers in AI-Driven Skills Restructuring
Tags AI · Enterprise
General Motors laid off approximately 500-600 salaried IT employees, primarily in Austin, Texas, and Warren, Michigan, as part of a workforce restructuring to replace traditional IT roles with AI-focused talent. GM CEO Mary Barra stated that approximately 90% of autonomous driving code is now AI-generated. Despite the cuts, GM is still hiring for approximately 80 open IT positions in AI, motorsports, and autonomous vehicles. The company offered severance of two months (1-4 years tenure) scaling to six months (12+ years). This follows August 2024 layoffs of approximately 1,000 software workers and October 2025 layoffs of 200+ CAD engineers.
Technical significance
GM's layoffs represent a concrete case of AI-driven workforce transformation in a legacy manufacturer. The claim that 90% of autonomous driving code is AI-generated suggests that code generation tools have moved beyond productivity enhancement to fundamental workforce restructuring. The simultaneous layoff and hiring — cutting traditional IT while adding AI-focused roles — illustrates that the AI labor market shift is not simply headcount reduction but skills reallocation.