Google on Tuesday offered buyouts to employees across several of its divisions, including those within its knowledge and information and central engineering units as well as marketing, research and communications teams, CNBC has learned. 

Knowledge and information, or K&I, is the unit that houses Google’s search, ads and commerce divisions. The buyouts Tuesday are the company’s latest effort to reduce headcount, which Google has continued to do in waves since laying off 12,000 employees in 2023. 

CNBC could not confirm how many employees were impacted by the latest round of buyouts. The Information reported earlier that the company offered buyouts to employees in the search and ads unit.

The “voluntary exit program” applies to U.S.-based employees, and some teams are also mandating office returns for remote workers who live within 50 miles of an office, the company confirmed. They will be expected to assume a hybrid work schedule “in order to bring folks more together in-person.”

“Earlier this year, some of our teams introduced a voluntary exit program with severance for U.S.-based Googlers, and several more are now offering the program to support our important work ahead,” Google spokesperson Courtenay Mencini wrote in an emailed statement to CNBC. 

K&I has approximately 20,000 employees. The unit underwent a re-organization in October that resulted in Google executive Nick Fox taking over the helm. Fox sent out a memo on Tuesday saying that employees who are not meeting expectations may want to take the buyout and that those who are excited by their work and doing well to remain with the company.

“I want to be very clear: If you’re excited about your work, energized by the opportunity ahead, and performing well, I really (really!) hope you don’t take this! We have ambitious plans and tons to get done,” Fox wrote, according to the memo which was reviewed by CNBC. “On the other hand, this VEP offers a supportive exit path for those of you who don’t feel aligned with our strategy, don’t feel energized by your work, or are having difficulty meeting the expectations of your role.”

The buyouts come after finance chief Anat Ashkenazi in October said that one of her top priorities would be to drive more cost cutting as Google expands its spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure in 2025. 

So far this year, the company’s “Platforms and Devices” unit and “People Operations” have also offered voluntary buyouts. Additionally, Google has demanded that some remote employees return to the office if they want to keep their jobs and avoid being part of broader cost cuts at the company, CNBC reported in April.

Google is also overhauling a popular internal learning platform to focus on teaching employees how to use modern AI tools in their work in a shift away from some of its nice-to-have programs to more business-essential offerings, CNBC reported Tuesday.

WATCH: Google Cloud is a great derivative play off growth of GenAI, says Evercore ISI’s Mark Mahaney

United Launch Alliance said Tuesday it was pushing back the second flight carrying Amazon‘s Project Kuiper internet satellites due to “multiple weather delays during launch processing.”

The launch from Florida’s Space Coast was originally slated for Friday afternoon, but it’s now scheduled to take place on June 16, at 1:25 p.m. ET, ULA said in a post to its site. Cape Canaveral and other parts of Florida’s Space Coast last week experienced several days of rain and high winds.

It will be the second voyage ferrying a batch of Kuiper satellites after a successful launch in April. The first mission dispatched 27 Kuiper satellites into low Earth orbit, a region of space that’s within 1,200 miles above the planet’s surface.

Amazon said in a blog post on Tuesday that the launch will take place no earlier than June 16, and will send “another 27 satellites into orbit, bringing our total constellation size to 54 satellites.”

Amazon is working to speed up its satellite deployments so that it can begin delivering service to customers later this year. The company will have to contend with steep competition from Elon Musk’s Space X, which operates Starlink.

Amazon aims to build a constellation of more than 3,000 satellites. The company has to meet a Federal Communications Commission deadline to launch half of its total constellation, or 1,618 satellites, by July 2026.

WATCH: Starlink gets green light to rollout service in India

Wall Street isn’t immune from the plot line that has generative AI resulting in wholesale knowledge worker replacement. A new tool from AlphaSense, called Deep Research, won’t provide any comfort.

The generative AI agent functions like a team of analysts operating at what AlphaSense calls “superhuman speed,” generating research and market insights, and building investment-grade briefings.

But Jack Kokko, AlphaSense CEO and a former Morgan Stanley analyst and Wharton School MBA, isn’t worried about the job outlook for Wall Street professionals.

“It’s a popular narrative,” Kokko told CNBC of the job replacement fears during an interview on “The Exchange” on Tuesday after AlphaSense ranked No. 8 on the 2025 CNBC Disruptor 50 list. “But I would not be so sure,” he said.

What Deep Research does is tap into the AlphaSense universe of more than 500 million business and financial documents, which includes filings, press releases, content about public and private companies, and expert insights based on call transcripts. Last year, the company spent nearly $1 billion to buy Tegus and its library of a quarter-million business-focused interviews.

“There are a hundred on a single company, and no human can read it all, but Deep Research will read it all and ask questions,” Kokko said.

It will answer questions too, ones that Wall Street analysts are often paid to field, within minutes.

The company, which dates back to 2011 and has had Goldman Sachs Growth Asset Management as an investor since its origin, already offers rapid summaries of equity research and real-time customizable reports. And it already has a tool called Generative Search designed to think like an analyst, ask natural language questions and receive precise insights sourced from AlphaSense’s content, which covers 37 languages.

Any of of its enterprise intelligence customers in equities research, corporate development and finance, on or off Wall Street, will be able to plug their internal document libraries into Deep Research, which will then be able to take both pro and con positions, and offer internal and external perspectives, in a report generated in record time.

“It would have taken a human analyst days or weeks,” Kokko said. “I was an analyst,” he added.

The company says it counts majority of the S&P 100 as clients. That client base grew by about 25% in 2024, to more than 5,000, including Amazon, Nvidia, Microsoft, Pfizer and JPMorgan.

For companies making investments that run into the millions or billions of dollars, being able to make these decisions on the back of all of this information is a revelation, Kokko said, citing the experience of a private equity firm that told AlphaSense that Deep Research did the same or even better on a report the AI ran than its in-house analysts could do in weeks.

There are plenty of reasons to believe that this is all bad news for knowledge professionals like finance bros. And more CEOs are starting to talk that way, from Shopify’s CEO who recently said no job hire requisitions will be approved unless a manager can prove that the job can’t be done by AI, to fellow Disruptor Anthropic‘s CEO Dario Amodei, who recently said AI would wipe out up to half of entry-level office jobs and whose latest Claude model can work 7 hours straight without a break or burnout.

Everyone is getting an AI assistant today — on Tuesday, it was Starbucks’ baristas.

Wall Street’s long embrace of AI has only accelerated in the wake of OpenAI’s arrival in 2022. Last August, JPMorgan Chase rolled out a generative artificial intelligence assistant to employees that can help them with tasks like writing emails and reports, while Morgan Stanley has already released a pair of OpenAI-powered tools for its financial advisors. In January, Goldman Sachs gave its bankers, traders and asset managers access to a generative AI assistant, the first stage in the evolution of a program that will eventually take on the traits of a seasoned Goldman employee, Goldman Sachs Chief Information Officer Marco Argenti told CNBC.

But Kokko says the Wall Street bonus — for now, and as he sees it, into the future — is safe. He is still of the belief that the latest AI will enhance the jobs of Wall Street analysts rather than threaten them. “What it does is make human analysts and business people so much more productive,” he said. “That person will be operating with a higher ROI [return on investment] and companies don’t cut high ROI people,” he added.

What AI job doomsday soothsayers are dismissing too easily today is “the top line expansion that comes from being able to do things in a much more agile way,” Kokko said.

“It’s 10x prior productivity when it is you and the machine,” he added.