Mumbai, March 13: Tech layoffs in 2024 are not expected to stop anytime soon. Now, the global technology company IBM has joined the layoffs in 2024 by announcing job cuts from the marketing and communication divisions. International Business Machines reportedly told its employees that it is slashing the size of the staff. The reports do not mention any specific number of employees to be laid off. 

According to a report by CNBC, the Chief Communication Officer at IBM, Jonathan Adashek, announced the lay off in the company's marketing and communication divisions during a seven-minute meeting with staffers in the unit. The report mentioned that in December 2023, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said that the company was upskilling all its employees on AI after announcing the replacement of around 8,000 jobs with artificial intelligence in August. Tech Layoffs 2024: AI Remains Primary Driver Behind Job Cuts in Tech Sector, Still Companies Attribute Them To Cost-Saving and Restructuring, Says Report. 

As per other reports, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna also said that the company expected to hold off on hiring employees for new roles because it thought artificial intelligence could replace them in the coming years. Departments that involved back-office functions, such as HR, were expected to witness slowed hiring. 

According to CNBC's report, the company was letting go of 3,900 jobs on its January earnings call. The report further said that the recent IBM layoffs were initiated alongside another round of downsizing in the tech sector. According to the Layoffs. fyi website, nearly 204 tech firms have laid off almost 50,000 employees. In January 2024, companies like Amazon, Unity, and Google-parent Alphabet let many employees go in the tech layoffs. World’s First AI Software Engineer 'Devin' Introduced, Capable of Coding and Creating Websites Using Single Prompt.

The report emphasised that IBM witnessed growth, but expansion remained "muted", and revenue increased by 4% in the fourth quarter. The IBM CFO James Kavanaugh reportedly spoke about rebalancing on the earnings call. After the introduction of ChatGPT by OpenAI, many companies have been trying to work on their own AI Chatbots and models to stay in the competition. The report also said that the same that IBM announced WatsonX studio to "train, tune and deploy machine-learning models". However, it has to compete with Microsoft's Copilot, Google's Gemini and OpenAI's ChatGPT. The report said that IBM is seen as a company falling behind the AI race, especially in making money from its products. 

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Mar 13, 2024 01:44 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).