GM swaps IT layoffs for AI hires as auto job cuts mount

General Motors is cutting more than 10% of its IT department, or about 600 salaried employees, while trying to refill the pipeline with workers who can build AI systems from the ground up. The company still had 82 open IT jobs, including roles tied to artificial intelligence, motorsports and autonomous vehicles, underscoring how the battle for talent is shifting from broad tech headcount to highly specific skills that blend software with hardware.

GM’s salaried workforce stood at about 68,000 globally at the end of last year, including 47,000 white-collar employees in the U.S. That makes the IT reduction a narrow but telling slice of a much larger restructuring. The jobs GM now wants most are AI-native development, data engineering and analytics, cloud-based engineering, agent and model development, prompt engineering and new AI workflow design. In practice, that means hiring people who can design systems, train models and build the data pipelines that support them, not just workers who use AI tools to speed up existing tasks.

The pressure is not isolated to Detroit. CNBC calculated that GM, Ford and Stellantis have together cut more than 20,000 U.S. salaried jobs, equal to 19% of their combined workforces, from recent peaks this decade. The reductions reflect a mix of factors, but the broader direction is clear: auto companies are using technology shifts, including AI, to reshape their white-collar ranks even as they try to stay competitive on software and autonomy.

The talent war is also pushing compensation higher in the self-driving and physical-AI market. Base salaries for some of the most sought-after roles have been running between $300,000 and $500,000, before equity and benefits, as robotics and defense tech companies compete with automakers and autonomous-vehicle startups for engineers who can bridge classical robotics and AI. Waymo appears less exposed because it is price insensitive, but startups and automakers that have heavily invested in autonomy are feeling the squeeze.

Some companies are finding a commercial payoff. Samsara spent the past decade collecting data from cameras mounted inside millions of trucks for driver monitoring, theft prevention and liability claims. It then trained its own model to detect potholes and estimate how quickly they are deteriorating. The product, Ground Intelligence, is now being pitched to cities, with Chicago among the municipalities under contract. The message for the industry is blunt: the firms that can turn AI into operating leverage will hire, the rest will keep cutting.