General Motors has just laid off ~600 salaried IT employees (about 10% of the department). The company’s general hiring trajectory is indicative of a larger shift: It’s obvious by now that global enterprises are mostly interested in people who know how to work with AI-native workflows.
There’s a backlash on X, there are discussions on Reddit, and people are even quoting the fresh encyclical by Pope Leo XIV to make sense of the layoffs. In the past year, we’ve seen more companies acting like they’re forced to restructure their whole workforce to foreground AI. Whether you agree with the Pope on the matters of AI’s influence on the workforce or not, major changes in the hiring trajectories of large enterprises generate the question, ‘Why didn’t these companies build AI capability into their teams in the first place?’ General Motors has the capacity to make such drastic decisions on the go (even if the process lacks certain elegance), while middle-sized companies don’t.
