IBM has carried out rolling workforce reductions impacting a low single-digit percentage of its global staff (thousands of positions) as part of a strategic shift toward artificial intelligence, hybrid cloud, and geographic reallocation, even as the company simultaneously expands entry-level hiring in specialized areas.
Key Aspects of IBM's Workforce StrategyTargeted Reductions:
Cuts have largely focused on experienced mid-career professionals, administrative and back-office support, and specific engineering segments (including Red Hat teams).
Geographic Shift: Observers note a trend of shifting functional roles toward lower-cost international regions like India while U.S. headcounts face optimization or flat growth.AI and Automation Integration: CEO Arvind Krishna and HR leadership have utilized internal automation and AI agents to absorb tasks previously handled by human workers (such as back-office HR functions), while pushing to triple entry-level hiring for customer engagement and AI management roles.Community and Market Consensus: Most users on Reddit agree that the recent wave of layoffs reflects a broader corporate pattern of resetting higher salary tiers under the banner of AI adoption and efficiency.
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@aq it’s mostly masters and PhD programs that have a ton of students from India and china
Even AI knows we are fd
IBM AI = substituting high cost labor for low cost labor accomplished via offshoring. There is a reason IBM NA headcount and Northern Europe headcount has gone down by 100k while Indias headcount has gone up by 100k. It’s all about costs
There are many hard working families in the US who cannot afford to help with college expenses for their children. The affluent families send their kids to the US to the universities while our own hard working families cannot afford college for their kids. It is sad and so messed up.
We should limit students from India to attend colleges in the US. Not being racist here. Just a fact that they flood our universities and then take our US jobs away
Let me fix this for you. No jobs have been replaced by AI. The operative word here is "replaced" as it assumes a similar level of quality.
Arvind's destruction of the helpdesk was a cut to service. He provided a chat bot as a sort of consolation prize despite the fact its own metrics showed it was not solving problems -- when they bothered to collect them. They relied on a lot on useless internal metrics that in the best case measured output, but not outcome. Those jobs were not replaced, they were simply eliminated. Remember Arvind's three word motto ended with the words "eliminate". That's what he's done.
In the final analysis, at IBM at least, "AI" has been nothing but cover for an unprecedented increase of outsourcing to India. There too they never show it has actually "replaced" the jobs of the original workers; they're simply occupying the same seats without regards to quality or outcome. Thanks to McKinsey that that's the IBM way.