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POLAND – 2023/09/11: In this photo illustration, IBM logo seen displayed on a smartphone with Artifical Intelligence (AI) symbols in the background. 

Omar Marques | Lightrocket | Getty Images

IBM on Tuesday told employees in its marketing and communications division that it’s slashing the size of its staff, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.

Jonathan Adashek, IBM’s chief communications officer, made the announcement in a roughly seven-minute meeting with staffers in the unit, said the person, who asked not to be named because the news hasn’t been made public.

In December, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna told CNBC that the company was “massively upskilling all of our employees on AI,” after it announced a plan in August to replace nearly 8,000 jobs with AI. IBM said on its earnings call in January of last year that it was cutting 3,900 positions.

“In 4Q earnings earlier this year, IBM disclosed a workforce rebalancing charge that would represent a very low single digit percentage of IBM’s global workforce, and we expect to exit 2024 at roughly the same level of employment as we entered with,” IBM told CNBC in a statement.

The latest cuts come alongside another round of downsizing in the tech industry. So far this year, some 204 tech companies have cut almost 50,000 jobs, according to the website Layoffs.fyi. January was the busiest month for layoffs since March, as Alphabet, Amazon and Unity all announced job cuts.

IBM has returned to growth in the past couple years, but expansion remains muted. Revenue in the fourth quarter increased 4% from a year earlier even as earnings topped estimates. CFO James Kavanaugh spoke of workforce rebalancing on the earnings call.

The company has been trying to fit into the emerging AI narrative, which has been the big story across tech since OpenAI released ChatGPT in late 2022. In May, IBM announced WatsonX, billed as a development studio for companies to “train, tune and deploy” machine-learning models.

The book of business for generative AI and Watsonx products doubled in size from the third quarter of 2023, when it was in the low hundreds of millions, according to IBM’s earnings call in January.

IBM faces steep competition in the enterprise AI realm. MicrosoftGoogleAmazon and others have similar offerings, and IBM has long been viewed as falling behind in the AI race, particularly when it comes to making money from its products.

“I think that’s a fair criticism, that we were slow to monetize and slow to make really consumable the learnings from Watson winning Jeopardy,” Krishna told CNBC in December. “The mistake we made was that I think we went after very big, monolithic answers, which the world was not ready to absorb.”

Nearly two years ago, IBM sold its Watson Health unit for an undisclosed amount to private equity firm Francisco Partners.

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Microsoft will raise prices of commercial Office subscriptions in July

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Microsoft will raise prices of commercial Office subscriptions in July

A general view of the Microsoft office building is seen in Cologne, Germany, on November 18, 2025.

Nurphoto | Nurphoto | Getty Images

Microsoft said Thursday that it will increase the prices of Office productivity software subscriptions for commercial and government clients on July 1.

The company’s Office applications, which include Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, have been facing increased competition in recent years from Google.

“We are continuously investing and innovating our platform for the future,” Nicole Herskowitz, corporate vice president for Microsoft 365 and Copilot, wrote in a blog post. “In the last year, we released more than 1,100 features across Microsoft 365, Security, Copilot, and SharePoint.” The new features have added value to the suites, she wrote.

Price hikes for commercial Office subscriptions have been infrequent. In 2022, Microsoft raised prices of its productivity bundles for the first time since launching the original Office 365 subscriptions in 2011. Microsoft changed the name of Office 365 to Microsoft 365 in 2020. In January, Microsoft announced a price hike for consumer Office bundles.

Microsoft offers Office 365 subscriptions for commercial use that include access to its productivity applications, along with higher-priced Microsoft 365 subscriptions that also include Windows operating system updates.

Here’s a breakdown of the commercial price changes:

  • For small and medium-sized businesses, Microsoft 365 Business Basic will cost $7 per person per month, up from $6.
  • Microsoft 365 Business Standard will be available for $14, up from $12.50.
  • Microsoft 365 Business Premium will continue to cost $22.
  • The entry-level Office 365 E1 offering for enterprises will still be sold for $10.
  • Office 365 E3 will jump 13% to $26 from $23.
  • The Microsoft 365 E3 package including Windows for enterprises will rise 8% to $39 from $36.
  • The full-featured Microsoft 365 E5 will increase to $60 from $57.
  • For front-line workers such as cashiers, Microsoft 365 F1 subscriptions will cost $3, up from $2.25.
  • Microsoft 365 F3 will be available for $10, up from $8.

The U.S. Defense Department and other government clients will face similar percentage price increases.

The various subscriptions all exclude access to the $30 Microsoft 365 Copilot add-on that draws on generative artificial intelligence models. Some companies have started widely rolling out Copilot, while others have held off on expanding their deployments, CNBC reported last week.

In many cases, organizations receive discounts off of list prices, but Microsoft has cut back on direct volume deals for some types of customers.

Almost 43% of Microsoft’s $77.7 billion in fiscal first-quarter revenue came from its Productivity and Businesses Processes segment, which includes Office. In October, the company said revenue from Microsoft 365 commercial cloud services jumped 17%, while seats increased 6%, mainly from products targeting small and medium-sized businesses and front-line workers.

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Google taps AI vibe-coder Replit in challenge to Anthropic and Cursor

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Google taps AI vibe-coder Replit in challenge to Anthropic and Cursor

People walk next to the Google Cloud logo, during the 2025 Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, Spain, March 4, 2025.

Albert Gea | Reuters

Google Cloud announced Thursday a multi-year partnership with artificial intelligence coding startup Replit, giving the search giant fresh firepower against the coding products of rivals, including Anthropic and Cursor

Under the partnership, Replit will expand usage of Google Cloud services, add more of Google’s models onto its platform, and support AI coding use cases for enterprise customers.

Google will continue to be Replit’s primary cloud provider. 

Replit, founded nearly a decade ago, is a leader in the fast-growing AI vibe-coding space.

In September, the startup closed a $250 million funding round that almost tripled its valuation to $3 billion, and said it grew annualized revenue from $2.8 million to $150 million in less than a year. 

And new data from Ramp, a fintech company that also tracks enterprise spending on its platform, found that Replit had the fastest new customer growth among software vendors. Google, meanwhile, is adding new customers and spending faster than any other company on Ramp’s platform.

Put those together, and you get a clearer picture of why both companies see opportunity.

Read more CNBC tech news

Vibe-coding emerged as a phenomenon earlier this year after AI models became more adept at generating code using only natural language prompts, allowing users with little experience in programming to use AI to create functioning code and potentially full applications. 

Anthropic announced on Tuesday that its product Claude Code hit $1 billion in run-rate revenue. The coding startup Cursor, in November, closed a funding round that valued it at $29.3 billion, while also announcing it reached $1 billion in annualized revenue. 

Replit, which bills itself as an easy-to-use product for non-developers, could help drive Google Cloud adoption among enterprises, and expand the reach of its AI efforts beyond traditional engineers. 

Google is riding on the momentum of its new top-scoring model, Gemini 3. Shares of Alphabet have risen more than 12% since its debut. 

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