General Motors laid off roughly 600 salaried workers from its information technology department on Monday. The company confirmed the cuts to TechCrunch after Bloomberg first reported the news, though GM declined to disclose exact figures or which teams were affected.

The layoffs represent more than 10% of GM's IT workforce. Cuts are concentrated in Austin, Texas and Warren, Michigan, according to sources familiar with the matter.

GM is framing this as a workforce swap rather than a straightforward reduction. A person familiar with the layoffs told TechCrunch that the company is still hiring IT workers, but for different capabilities: AI-native development, data engineering, cloud infrastructure, agent and model development, and prompt engineering. GM wants people who can build AI systems from scratch, not simply use AI as a productivity tool.

The Statement

In an emailed statement, GM offered standard corporate language: "GM is transforming its Information Technology organization to better position the company for the future. As part of that work, we have made the difficult decision to eliminate certain roles globally."

Translation: some skills have become obsolete. Others are now in demand. The company is swapping one for the other.

A Year of Executive Reshuffling

The cuts arrive nearly a year after GM hired Sterling Anderson as chief product officer. Anderson, who co-founded the autonomous trucking company Aurora and previously led Tesla's Model X program and Autopilot team, joined GM in May 2025 with a $40 million hiring package. His mandate was to integrate GM's fragmented software, hardware, and services operations into a unified product organization.

That consolidation has already displaced senior leadership. Last November, three top software executives left GM: Baris Cetinok, senior vice president of software and services product management; Dave Richardson, senior vice president of software and services engineering; and Barak Turovsky, who spent just nine months as GM's chief AI officer.

Anderson has since brought in new AI-focused hires. Behrad Toghi, formerly of Apple, joined as AI lead in October. Rashed Haq, who spent five years as head of AI and robotics at Cruise before GM shut down that autonomous vehicle unit in December 2024, came aboard as vice president of autonomous vehicles.

Not an Isolated Case

This is not GM's first round of IT-related cuts. In October 2025, the company laid off more than 200 computer-aided design engineers. In August 2024, GM cut roughly 1,000 software workers. The Georgia IT Innovation Center in Roswell is being shuttered, with most of those jobs gone by mid-2026.

GM is hardly alone. Meta, Amazon, Oracle, Snap, and others have cut thousands of workers in 2026, many in roles companies now consider misaligned with AI-centric strategies. The pattern is familiar across enterprise tech: companies are not just adding AI tools, they are deliberately restructuring their workforces around them.

The layoffs also follow solid first-quarter results at GM, suggesting the cuts are not born from financial distress. The company is repositioning, not retreating.

What This Signals

For workers in legacy IT roles, the message is clear. Enterprise employers increasingly distinguish between workers who use AI and workers who can build it. The former category is shrinking. The latter is where hiring demand is concentrated.

GM employed more than 68,000 people globally as of the end of 2025. Monday's layoffs represent less than 1% of total headcount. But they represent something more significant for the IT workforce: skills that were table stakes five years ago no longer guarantee a job.