In Trump era, companies are rebranding DEI efforts, not giving up
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, attends the inauguration of a new hub in France dedicated to the artificial intelligence sector, at the Google France headquarters in Paris, France, on Feb. 15, 2024.
Gonzalo Fuentes | Reuters
After Google scrapped its diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, hiring aspirations in February, CEO Sundar Pichai addressed the matter with his employees at a company all-hands meeting.
“We believe in building a representative workforce,” Pichai said, according to audio obtained by CNBC. “We’re a global company, we have users around the world, and we think the best way to serve them well is by having a workforce that represents that diversity, and we’ll continue to do that.”
“At the same time, as a company we will always have to comply with local laws,” Pichai added.
Among the most notable changes by Google thus far was with Melonie Parker, the company’s chief diversity officer. As of February, her title has been changed to vice president of Googler engagement.
Google’s approach to DEI is emblematic of changes that companies across the U.S. are making to their DEI programs in the wake of President Donald Trump’s election and initial actions in his return to the White House.
Over the past decade, Silicon Valley and other industries used DEI programs to root out bias in hiring, promote fairness in the workplace and advance the careers of women and people of color – demographics that have historically been overlooked.
While DEI started as an umbrella acronym to even the playing field, it’s become a loaded term.
In 2023, the Supreme Court ruled against Harvard University’s affirmative action admission policies – a decision that had implications for how corporations hire. In one of his first acts of his second term, President Donald Trump signed an executive order in January to end the government’s DEI programs and put federal officials overseeing those initiatives on leave.
The order directs “all departments and agencies to take strong action to end private sector DEI discrimination, including civil compliance investigations.” The administration has targeted nearly 50 companies that it’s deemed to be in violation of its anti-DEI rules, Bloomberg reported in February.
Among the first of those targets is the Walt Disney Company. The Federal Communications Commission informed the company on Friday that it will begin an investigation into the DEI efforts at the media giant.
Trump has shown he’s willing to fault DEI policies for human tragedy.
Following a midair collision between an American Airlines regional jet and a Black Hawk military helicopter above Washington in January, Trump blasted the Biden administration’s DEI policies for the crash without citing any evidence. Trump claimed DEI “could have been” to blame for the deadliest plane crash in the U.S. since 2001.
“When you have the president blaming DEI for a plane crash, I think it makes sense that companies don’t want to be out there no matter how they define it internally,” Emerson said.
Despite DEI becoming such a divisive term, companies are not necessarily ending their efforts. They’re rebranding them. Many companies are continuing DEI work but using different language or rolling it under less charged terminology, like “learning” or “hiring.”
Paradigm’s CEO Joelle Emerson is an advocate for diversity and inclusion.
Source: Paradigm
DEI by any other name
Joelle Emerson has worked since 2014 as a consultant for several hundred clients on workplace performance as well as diversity and inclusion strategies, but last year, she changed the language used to describe her digital platform Paradigm.
Whereas before Paradigm marketed itself as helping clients “harness the power of diversity and inclusion to create a culture where everyone can do their best work and thrive,” the company’s website now states that its solutions “create an inclusive, high-performance culture where everyone can do their best work and thrive.”
Paradigm began using DEI in 2020 after the term proliferated in the corporate response to protests across the country in the wake of George Floyd’s death.
“We started using that a lot on our websites so that companies searching for ‘DEI’ could find us,” Emerson told CNBC. “Pre-election, as we were seeing a lot of the backlash, we reduced our use of the acronym because I didn’t think it would be the best description of what we do.”
Devika Brij, who does similar work through her Brij The Gap consulting firm, detailed her efforts to distinguish her work in a newsletter sent out in February titled “Tailored Career and Leadership Development Isn’t DEI.” For companies like Brij’s, the re-branding is critical to the future of their business – some of Brij’s clients have slashed their DEI budgets by as much as 90% since 2023, she said at the time.
It’s not just consulting firms that are rebranding DEI.
JPMorgan in March announced that it will replace “equity” with “opportunity” in a rebrand of its DEI program. Walmart in November said it was shifting from DEI to saying “Walmart for everyone.” Among Fortune 100 companies, there was a 22% decrease in the use of terms like “DEI” and “diversity” and a 59% increase in terms like “belonging” between 2023 and 2024, according to Paradigm.
Emerson said 2023 marked the turning point for DEI in Silicon Valley.
That’s when Google began getting rid of staffers who were in charge of recruiting people from underrepresented groups, CNBC reported. The company also let go of DEI leaders under Parker.
Amazon also reorganized its DEI group in 2023 and brought global teams under one umbrella named “Inclusive Experiences & Technology.” The company renamed the group to better represent the nature of the work, a company spokesperson told CNBC, adding that Amazon remains committed to building a diverse and inclusive company.
As part of that overhaul, Amazon’s Candi Castleberry changed her vice president title from “VP of Global Diversity Equity and Inclusion” to “VP of Inclusive Experiences & Technology.”
Tech’s DEI rollback has accelerated in 2025.
Google, which has cloud-computing contracts with federal agencies, announced in February that it would retire its aspirational hiring targets following Trump’s executive orders. Google’s commitments for 2025 had included increasing the number of people from underrepresented groups in leadership by 30% and more than doubling the number of Black workers at non-senior levels.
“Our values are enduring, but we have to comply with legal directions depending on how they evolve,” Pichai told staffers at the February all-hands meeting.
He and Parker were answering a question from staffers about how the company’s DEI programs would be impacted given Trump’s recent executive orders.
“As a federal contractor, we have been reviewing all our programs, all our initiatives,” Parker said. “With regards to training, we’re going to deprecate, or stop or sunset, a number of our training programs that are focused on DEI.”
A spokesperson for Google did not clarify which of the company’s DEI programs have been cut.
Pichai went on to assure workers that Google would continue to support its employee resource groups. Those are employee-led networks within the company that focus on specific demographic or affinity groups, such as “Women@Google” and “Black Googler Network.”
Those comments, however, came before the Equality Employment Opportunity Commission published guidance in March that listed ERGs as a potential violation of Trump’s executive order if they are exclusionary. Google’s ERGs are open to all employees and do not exclude any protected groups, the company spokesperson told CNBC.
“Based on the current legal climate, we’re reviewing our DEI programs and making changes where needed,” the Google spokesperson said in a statement.
Melonie Parker speaks on stage during The 37th Annual Hispanic Heritage Awards at The Kennedy Center on Sept. 5, 2024 in Washington, DC.
Paul Morigi | Getty Images
The sensitivity of the term DEI came to the forefront earlier this month at Austin’s annual South by Southwest conference. There, Google and Oracle had been slated to participate in a panel, originally titled “Successful Workplaces: Balancing Growth and Well-Being.”
“Attendees will leave with actionable insights to align business success with a thriving workplace culture,” an early description of the panel noted.
Oracle dropped out from the panel in February. That month, panel organizers informed participating companies that they were considering changing the focus of the conversation to the state of DEI in the workplace.
“The fact that the Trump administration took such an aggressive approach to DEI just made obvious, in our view, how timely this discussion was,” said panel organizer Luis Gramajo, founder of nonprofit Sunday Afternoon Foundation, which helped organize that particular SXSW panel.
The Google panelist dropped out in March after the panel’s name was officially changed to “Post-DEI Workplace: Tech Companies Managing Through Turmoil.”
“We went through I don’t know how many prep calls, we changed the title of this eight plus times, we lost people who were afraid to be on this panel,” said Chelsea Toler, one of the SXSW panelists and a co-founder at Logictry, an Austin startup.
Google was not informed of the change until late February, the company spokesperson told CNBC, adding that the panel’s new topic was outside of the employee’s role and experience.
“We had a couple different panelists back out because this conversation, which is so important, has become kind of nuclear at this point, which is wild,” said Diana Ransom, Inc. Magazine executive editor and the panel’s moderator, at the event.
Gramajo said he doesn’t begrudge any of the panelists or companies that pulled out of the panel.
“They are, as we all are, navigating an incredibly complex and uncertain time, where the rules are not clear,” he said.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy looks on during an Amazon Devices launch event in New York City, U.S., February 26, 2025.
Brendan McDermid | Reuters
Amazon has also pulled back on DEI.
The company told staffers in December that it was halting some of its DEI programs as part of a broader review of those initiatives. It also eliminated references to inclusion and diversity in its annual report while altering a website to remove sections titled “Equity for Black people” and “LGBTQ+ rights.”
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy characterized the DEI eliminations as being part of Amazon’s ongoing cost-cutting efforts.
“If you look at us, kind of like a lot of other companies, particularly after George Floyd, and particularly because we’re so decentralized, we had a lot of programs in this area,” Jassy told staffers earlier this month, according to audio obtained by CNBC. “We had about 300 programs.”
Amazon began evaluating its DEI programs “a couple years ago,” Jassy said.
“We realized there were several of them where we weren’t getting enough value out of them for us to be investing in that way and those programs, we streamlined those,” Jassy said. “And in the programs where we were having a real impact, we doubled down.”
It’s unclear which programs Amazon cut and which it has expanded.
Continuing the work
“The acronym of DEI is completely unhelpful,” said Aubrey Blanche-Serrallano, vice president of equitable operations at Culture Amp, a human resources platform. “Diversity is incredibly valuable and important, but that specific acronym obscures a lot of what we’re talking about.”
For all the backlash toward DEI in Washington, recent studies show that this type of work remains popular among workers and companies.
Pew Research in 2023 found that 86% of workers say they have a neutral-to-favorable opinion about increasing diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace. Paradigm, meanwhile, published a study last year which found that 73% of companies included diversity, equity and inclusion in their company values, on par with 2023.
“The feeling of the moment doesn’t match a lot of the data I’m looking at,” Blanche-Sarellano said.
The experts that spoke with CNBC said they’ve yet to lose any clients as a result of the DEI backlash. To the contrary, they said they are optimistic that organizations will be forced to be more thoughtful about their plans and do away with “performative” aspects of DEI that did little to move the needle.
Experts said one key example of performative actions were when companies signaled support for social media movements, like 2020’s Blackout Tuesday, without any meaningful action to follow. Another example were companies that added chief diversity officers to their ranks without giving them formalized decision-making power or budgets.
Among the changes happening now are companies shifting away from diversity reports, which tracked hiring based on different genders and ethnicities, and focusing instead on tracking the rates at which promotions and attrition happen, Emerson said.
Companies are also changing how they have candidates apply for programs, Emerson said. With internships designed for specific ethnicities, for example, candidates might no longer simply check whether they are black or Hispanic but instead write an essay about their background, she said.
Some experts are helping their clients calculate how much risk they may face by continuing DEI work under different names.
“There’s a lot of legal gray area right now,” Blanche-Sarellano said. “At the end of the day, they want to focus on investing in their employees, not spend all their resources on a lawsuit.”
Y-Vonne Hutchinson, chief executive officer of ReadySet, speaks during the Bloomberg Breakaway CEO Summit in New York, U.S., on Tuesday, June 18, 2019.
Mark Kauzlarich | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Companies have to weigh the risk of regulatory compliance and the potential for public backlash against the cost of doubling down on DEI, said Y-Vonne Hutchinson, founder of ReadySet, a firm that helps clients “build adaptable organizations.”
“A lot of these companies have more diverse consumers,” she said. “They still have to think about what is going to make them money and viable businesses have to think about a global audience.”
ReadySet, for example, has what it calls a “DEI Risk Assessment Tool” which measures DEI risks across five dimensions: Legal and compliance, reputational, financial, cultural and workforce and operational risks.
By changing the terminology that is used, companies can prevent their work from being susceptible to misunderstanding, said Emerson, adding that her firm Paradigm is advising companies to be more specific about what they want to achieve.
“We should be more precise in the language we use,” she said.
But while some experts are encouraging companies to change their terminologies, others are advising those in the field to continue touting DEI.
That was the case at the Post-DEI panel at SXSW. The panelists challenged the notion that they should stop using it.
“DEI means everybody has a fair and equitable opportunity to succeed,” said Fran Harris, an entrepreneur based in Austin. “We have to remind people what DEI is – it is the work. It’s not just an acronym. It’s the work of creating equal opportunities, period.”
Panelists encouraged attendees to not succumb to fear.
“In this country, when we stop using our voice because we’re scared, we’ve lost,” Logictry’s Toler said.
Photo illustration shows the TikTok logo displayed on a mobile phone screen.
Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images
For the second time this year, TikTok is staring at a deadline that could determine its fate in the U.S. and that of numerous creators and brands that have built businesses on the Chinese-owned social app.
The sense of urgency that led some creators to post wistful goodbye videos in January has shifted to a more cautiously optimistic outlook, with creators and firms saying they believe TikTok will remain in the U.S. They are, however, hedging their bets.
“I’m trying to be optimistic and hope that they keep it, but as a creator, I have to be prepared either way,” said Gianna Christine, a creator with 2.7 million TikTok followers.
TikTok could be effectively banned in the U.S. on April 5 because of a national security law originally signed by former President Joe Biden that requires its Chinese parent ByteDance to divest the app’s American operations. ByteDance originally faced a Jan. 19 deadline to sell TikTok, but Trump signed an executive order instructing the attorney general to not enforce the law, granting the Chinese company 75 more days to divest the U.S. portion of its business.
Gianna Christine makes lifestyle videos about living in New York City to her nearly 3 million followers on TikTok.
Gianna Christine
Like others who spoke with CNBC, Christine said she hasn’t received any direct updates from TikTok about its future. Christine said she’s staying positive about TikTok’s chances of remaining in the U.S. but she’s also expanding her presence on platforms like Snapchat and YouTube as a precaution.
“You never know what will happen,” Christine said.
Throughout his 2024 presidential campaign, Trump said many positive comments about TikTok and used the app as a campaign tool. Trump said Sunday that he is “pretty certain” that a TikTok deal will be reached before the April deadline, according to AFP. Last week, Trump said he may extend the deadline if a deal isn’t reached and that he may reduce tariffs on China to help facilitate a transaction.
“I really don’t see TikTok getting banned,” said Olivia Plotnick, the founder of the Wai Social marketing and consultancy agency. “Trump really is going to want to show how amazing he is, and make a deal happen.”
TikTok and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.
Whatever is in store for TikTok, the company is acting like business as usual.
Current and former TikTok workers said they have received no communication from management about its future in the U.S. Brands and creators said they have received no updates from the company either.
That lack of communication and the uncertainty of the app’s future hasn’t stopped TikTok from moving forward with new partnerships.
Marketing firm Meltwater, for example, announced that it joined TikTok’s marketing partners program in March. Aditya Jami, Meltwater’s tech chief, said that his TikTok contacts seemed to be “in the dark” about the app’s future, but they went ahead with the partnership, which will require deep integration between the two companies.
“They are actually going to do more and more things that we can build together and then expose to our customers, so I feel like it’s going business as usual,” Jami said.
TikTok creator Alyssa McKay has more than 10 million followers, but she’s been proactive about diversifying her following across more platforms.
“If you’re not already posting on Snapchat, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, that’s where you need to be,” said McKay, adding that her efforts to get ahead of a potential ban have resulted in her already earning more revenue from other platforms than she does on TikTok.
Alyssa McKay is a content creator with over 10 million followers on TikTok.
Alyssa McKay
The first TikTok ban deadline didn’t significantly alter the social media postings from creators and brands, according to data provided to CNBC by Later, a social media and influencer marketing firm.
Social media users increased their posts on Threads and YouTube by 10% and 6%, respectively, the week of the TikTok ban in January compared to the week prior, according to Later. Still, the general posting habits of brands and creators during the week after the January deadline compared to the week preceding it were nearly identical, a spokesperson for Later said.
Throughout March, creators and brands steadily reduced the number of scheduled TikTok posts they plan to publish during the weeks leading up to the April deadline while increasing their scheduled Instagram posts, Later data showed. The March data suggests creators and brands are “reallocating content to Instagram as a safer or more stable alternative,” the Later spokesperson said.
For a brief moment, the Chinese social media app RedNote rose to the top of Apple’s app store during the week leading to the January deadline. Known as Xiaohongshu in China, that app has similar short-video features as TikTok, but it has a user base comprised mostly of women from more affluent Chinese cities that embraced the sudden influx of American users, Plotnick of Wai Social said.
“They were super welcoming, and it was a really fun time,” Plotnick said.
RedNote’s moment in the sun won’t likely repeat. The app is no longer a priority now that TikTok has resumed normal operations, creators and brands said.
“I don’t foresee buzz around alternative apps like RedNote,” Later CEO Scott Sutton said. “Those were a blip and lacked the staying power of other platforms.”
It’s unclear whether lawmakers who are concerned about the Chinese Communist Party or TikTok-competitors like Meta or Google would take to the courts to enforce the national security law, said Neil Chilson, a former chief technologist at the Federal Trade Commission who now heads AI policy at Abundance Institute non-profit. Taking that kind of legal action carries the risk of upsetting TikTok’s giant user base and Trump, Chilson said.
“Trump likes this sort of leverage that the law provides him,” Chilson said. “He’s obviously using quite aggressively — not quite in the text of the law — his latitude to make deals to continue to string this along.”
WATCH: TikTok is a digital Trojan horse, says Hayman Capital’s Kyle Bass
Amazon has restarted drone deliveries in two states after a months-long pause, the company confirmed.
In January, Amazon halted Prime Air deliveries in College Station, Texas, and Tolleson, Arizona, the two U.S. markets where it’s testing the service, as the company rolled out a software update to its drone fleet.
Amazon discovered an abnormality with the drone’s altitude sensor, caused by dust in the air, that could have caused its system to produce an inaccurate reading of its position relative to the ground, the company said. Amazon “never experienced an actual safety issue,” but said it opted to suspend deliveries while it corrected the issue.
The company brought drone deliveries back online last week after it completed the software update and received approval from the Federal Aviation Administration, Amazon spokesperson Av Zammit said in a statement.
“Safety underscores everything we do at Prime Air, which is why we paused our operations to conduct a software update on the MK30 drone,” Zammit said. “The updates are now complete and were approved by the FAA, allowing us to resume deliveries.”
An FAA spokesperson didn’t immediately provide a comment.
Zammit said Prime Air has seen “unprecedented levels of demand” since it resumed service. David Carbon, an executive who oversees Amazon’s drone program, wrote in a LinkedIn post last week that the company dropped a bottle of ZzzQuil sleep medicine at an Arizona customer’s home in “31 minutes and 30 seconds.” Carbon didn’t say how far the drone had to fly and Zammit declined to provide details.
For over a decade, Amazon has been working to bring to life founder Jeff Bezos’ vision of drones whizzing toothpaste, books and batteries to customers’ doorsteps in 30 minutes or less. But progress has been slow, as Prime Air has only been made available in the U.S. in College Station and Tolleson. A test site in Lockeford, California, was shuttered last April. The program was also hit with layoffs in 2023 as Amazon CEO Andy Jassy cut costs across the company.
Amazon has set a goal to deliver 500 million packages by drone per year by the end of the decade. The company last year notched a critical regulatory milestone that could enable it to accelerate deliveries. It’s eyed international expansion to the U.K., and recently welcomed Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy in a visit to a Prime Air facility.
The company also introduced a new version of its delivery drone, called the MK30, which is designed to be quieter than previous models and can fly in light rain.
Customers in College Station, a quiet suburban town that’s about 100 miles northwest of Houston, had previously complained about the drones’ noise levels. After rolling out the MK30, the company is also taking steps to relocate its drone hub farther away from residents’ homes later this year.
Before Amazon suspended drone deliveries, the MK30 crashed in two separate incidents during test flights at the company’s facility in Pendleton, Oregon. Last December, a software issue caused two drones to crash, according to Bloomberg. And in September, a pilot mistakenly caused a “mid-air collision” between two drones after he tested how the MK30 would perform when faced with a failed propeller, according to a federal crash report.
Another crash occurred on Feb. 21 during tests at the Pendleton site, which resulted in a drone sustaining substantial damage, according to a report compiled by the National Transportation Safety Board.
Amazon said the crashes were unrelated to its decision to halt drone operations. The company has said these kinds of incidents, which have also occurred with other models in previous years, are part of the testing process, as it pushes drone systems “up to the limits and beyond.”
WATCH: Amazon, Alphabet’s Wing and Zipline race to roll out drone delivery
LightSource cofounders: CTO Idan Mintz and CEO Spencer Penn
Courtesy: LightSource
With President Donald Trump set to impose sweeping tariffs on a wide swath of U.S. trading partners this week, corporate America is awash in uncertainty.
LightSource, a San Francisco startup whose software helps companies manage their procurement process, costs and vendor relationships, didn’t know what the president’s tariffs plan would look like before raising its first funding round. But the timing didn’t hurt.
LightSource has just closed a $33 million financing, led by Bain Capital Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from J2 Ventures.
“Tariffs and trade winds are shifting so fast, it’s enough to make your head spin,” said Ajay Agrawal, a partner at Bain and now a board member at LightSource. “For a company with hundreds or thousands of different parts and suppliers — even just understanding what the impact will be on their whole enterprise is unbelievable.”
President Trump’s plans to slap “reciprocal tariffs” on all countries with duties on U.S. goods is set to be announced on Wednesday. Concerns surrounding the impact of those moves pushed the Nasdaq down more than 10% in the first quarter, the index’s biggest drop for any period since 2022.
Trump has already said he would impose 25% tariffs on “all cars that are not made in the United States.” Autos is a market that co-founder and CEO Spencer Penn knows well.
LightSource was started in 2021 by Penn and CTO Idan Mintz, while the two were working in different parts of Alphabet. Penn was at robotaxi unit Waymo, and Mintz was in the Google X “moonshot factory.”
Prior to Waymo, Penn worked at Tesla when the electric vehicle maker was starting to mass produce its popular Model 3 sedans. He said that finance, sourcing and engineering professionals have to work together to find, or sometimes custom order, high-quality parts. They also have to maintain their best supplier relationships while evaluating new potential vendors and negotiating fair prices.
Often these teams rely on “hundreds of disparate processes and information that’s stuck in thousands of emails, spreadsheets and randomly formatted invoices and contracts,” Penn said.
LightSource, which has about 30 employees, connects a company’s procurement-related information sources and systems to streamline that complex work. The aim is to speed up a company’s procurement process, saving the business time, money and pain while working with suppliers.
Mintz describes LightSource’s offering as a kind of “operating system” for procurement. Penn says it has the potential to do for procurement what Salesforce did for customer relationships.
Whether it’s a global pandemic, a natural disaster cutting off a shipping route, or a major shift in tariffs and trade policy, Mintz said, any supply chain disruption can make a huge difference to a company’s profit margins and its ability to deliver a product on time.
Current customers include consumer packaged goods companies, aerospace ventures, e-commerce companies and automotive giants.
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