(Finance) – Competition takes its toll Google cuts employees. The high tech giant announced on Wednesday the dismissal of hundreds of workers of its hardware, Google Assistant and internal software teams. Fitbit co-founders James Park and Eric Friedman will also leave the company as part of the reorganization, as Google has integrated Fitbit features into its own brand of Pixel hardware. Overall – according to what the Verge website reports – the redundancies could reach around a thousand positions.
“During the second half of 2023, some of our teams made changes to become more efficient, work better, and to align their resources with higher product priorities,” said a Google representative in a note.
The Assistant team staff reduction comes as Google works to revitalize the latest generation project of Artificial Intelligence technology.
Alphabet, Google’s parent company has cut 12,000 jobs in 2023, or about 6% of its staff. According to regulatory filings, the company had 182,381 employees at the end of September. Before last year’s layoffs it employed up to 190,711 workers, as well as tens of thousands of contractors.
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