Google CEO defends job cuts in animated town hall as employees demand clarity on process
Sundar Pichai, CEO, Alphabet
Lluis Gene | AFP | Getty Images
Days after Google announced the largest round of layoffs in the company’s 25-year history, executives defended the job cuts and took questions from a concerned workforce during a town hall meeting Monday.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai led the companywide meeting and told employees executives will see their bonuses cut. He pleaded with staffers to remain motivated as Google faces heightened competition in areas like artificial intelligence, while also trying to explain why employees who lost their jobs were removed from the internal system without warning.
“I understand you are worried about what comes next for your work,” Pichai said. “Also very sad for the loss of some really good colleagues across the company. For those of you outside the U.S., the delay in being able to make and communicate decisions about roles in your region is undoubtedly causing anxiety.”
CNBC listened to audio of the meeting, which followed the company’s announcement Friday that it’s eliminating 12,000 jobs, or roughly 6% of the full-time workforce. While employees had been bracing for a potential layoff, they wanted answers regarding the criteria that was used to determine who would stay and who would go. Some of the laid-off staffers had long tenures and were recently promoted.
Pichai opened Monday’s town hall meeting acknowledging the Lunar New Year mass shooting in Southern California on Saturday night that killed 11 people and injured at least nine others.
“Many of us are still grappling with the violence in LA over the weekend and the tragic loss in life,” he said. “I know more details are yet to come out, but it’s definitely hit our Asian American community in a deep way, especially during the moment of Lunar New Year and we’re all thinking of them.”
‘We have over 30,000 managers’
After moving the conversation to job cuts, Pichai offered some explanation for how he and the executive team made their decisions.
Pichai said he consulted with the founders and controlling shareholders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, as well as the board of directors.
Pichai said 2021 marked “one of the strongest years we’ve ever had in the history of the company,” with 41% revenue growth. Google increased head count to match that expansion, and Pichai said the company was assuming growth would persist.
“In that context, we made a set of decisions that might have been right if the trends continued,” he said. “You have to remember if the trend had continued and we had not hired to keep pace, we would fall behind in many areas as a company.”
Google and Alphabet finance chief Ruth Porat responded to a couple employee questions in Monday’s town hall that addressed its recent layoff.
Executives said 750 senior leaders were involved in the process, adding it took a few weeks to determine who would be laid off.
“We have over 30,000 managers at Google and to consult with all of them would have made this an open process where it would have taken additional weeks or even months to come to a decision,” said Fiona Cicconi, Google’s chief people officer, at the meeting. “We wanted to get certainty sooner.”
Regarding the criteria for cuts, Cicconi said execs looked at areas where the work was necessary, but the company had too many people as well as places where the work itself wasn’t critical. Cicconi said the company considered “skill set, time in role where experience or relationships are relevant and matter, productivity indicators like sales quotas and performance history.”
Pichai indicated there would be executive compensation cuts but provided limited details. He said all senior vice presidents “will see a very significant reduction in their annual bonus” this year.
“The more senior you are, the more your compensation is tied to performance,” he said. “You can reduce your equity grants if performance is not great.”
Before the job cuts, Google had made the decision to pay out 80% of bonuses this month with the rest expected in March or April. In prior years, the full bonus was paid in January.
Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, offered some perspective on the areas that saw cuts. Google’s cloud unit has been one of the fastest-growing areas for head count expansion as the company tries to catch Amazon and Microsoft.
“Our engineering hiring is being much more targeted in areas where we need to fill out a product portfolio,” Kurian said. “We are adding sales and customer engineers in very specific countries and industries.”
Kurian said that starting in July, the cloud unit’s aim was to focus hiring “in response to generative AI across our portfolio.”
Like with other all-hands meetings, Google executives took questions from the company’s internal forum called Dory. Employees can post questions there, and they bubble up to the top when their co-workers give them an upvote.
For Monday’s meeting, some of the top-rated questions had to do with the process and communication around the layoffs. One comment said that employees are “playing a game of ping-and-hope-to-hear-back to figure out who lost their job. Can you speak to the communication strategy?”
Rick Osterloh, senior vice president of devices and services, said the company “deliberately didn’t share out of respect for people’s privacy.”
“We know this can be frustrating for people who are still here,” Osterloh said. “But losing your job without any choice in it is very difficult and it’s very personal and many people don’t want their names to be on a list that’s distributed to everyone.”
Looking ahead to A.I.
Another commenter on Dory wrote, “We severed access for 12k employees without the chance to perform knowledge transfers or even let them say goodbye to their colleagues. This is what we do to people who get fired.”
Then came the question: “What’s the message for those of us who are left?”
Royal Hansen, vice president of security at Google, chimed in to describe “an unusual set of risks that frankly we’re not that well practiced at managing.” He said there were “trade-offs.”
“When you think about our users and how critical they’ve become in people’s lives — all the products and services, the sensitive data they’ve trusted us with — even though it might have been a very low likelihood, we had to plan for the possibility that something could go terribly wrong,” Hansen said. “The best option was to close corporate access the way you described,” he said, referring to the abrupt shutdown.
In response to a question asking how employees who had been with the company for 15-plus years were targeted for cuts, Brian Glaser, vice president and chief talent and learning officer said, “we all know that no one is immune to change in our careers.”
Pichai reminded staffers that the company has important work ahead, in particular with respect to rapid progress in AI. Last month, Google employees asked executives at an all-hands meeting whether the AI chatbot ChatGPT represents a “missed opportunity” for Google.”
Pichai said Monday that “it will be an important year given the rapid advancements in AI,” which will have an impact across the company.
“There’s a paradigm shift with AI and I think, with the concentration of talent we have and work we will do here, will be a big draw and I hope it will continue to be,” Pichai added. “We have to keep earning it.”
He closed the town hall by bringing the discussion back to the topic at hand.
It’s evident, Pichai said, “how much you all care about your colleagues and the company.” He added, “I know it will take a lot more time to process this moment and what you heard today as well.”
WATCH: Google becoming leaner
Chinese EV company Xpeng showed off its newest humanoid robot in Guangzhou on Nov. 5, 2025.
CNBC | Evelyn Cheng
Guangzhou, CHINA — Chinese electric car company Xpeng plans to launch robotaxis next year after previously claiming it wouldn’t be a real business in the near future and took the wraps off of its latest humanoid robot model.
Xpeng’s technology push mirrors one of its key rivals Tesla, as the Guangzhou, China-headquartered company looks to position itself as more than just an electric car firm.
The automaker announced on Wednesday as part of its “AI Day” that it is launching three robotaxi models. The vehicles will use four of Xpeng’s self-developed “Turing” AI chips. Xpeng claims the chips represent the combined highest in-car computing power in the world, at 3,000 TOPS, an industry measure.
The semiconductors power Xpeng’s “vision-language-action (VLA)” model, now in its second iteration. This type of AI models take into account inputs like visual cues that can help with applications like driverless cars or robotics.
Alibaba announced Wednesday that it is partnering with Xpeng on robotaxis through the e-commerce company’s digital mapping subsidiary AutoNavi and Amaps app, which also includes a ride-hailing portal.
The Xpeng robotaxi includes an external display of speed and other information on the vehicle’s sun visors.
Xpeng said it plans to start testing robotaxis in Guangzhou and other Chinese cities next year.
Co-president Brian Gu told CNBC last week that robotaxis will “ultimately be a global phenomenon” but that it would take time to get there, especially given regulation. Back in April 2024, he cautioned that self-driving taxis wouldn’t become a significant business for at least five years.
During a group interview with reporters on Wednesday, Gu addressed his change in tone from last year toward robotaxis.
“The tech is happening faster than we anticipated,” Gu said.
He noted that the AI developments and the significant increase in computing power “give us the confidence we are near the inflection point” for robotaxis.
Xpeng’s strategy for robotaxis is to make two categories of cars: one for commercial self-driving shared vehicles, and another for fully autonomous personal cars that may be only shared among family members.
Xpeng’s robotaxi announcements come as Chinese players such as Pony.ai, WeRide and Baidu have ramped up global expansion plans after rolling out self-driving taxis to the public in parts of China. Tesla this year launched its long-awaited robotaxi program in parts of Texas.
Humanoid robot
Similar to Tesla’s push into humanoid robots, Xpeng on Wednesday announced its own version, the second-generation Iron robot. The Chinese company plans to begin mass production of the robots next year.
During a presentation on Wednesday, CEO He Xiaopeng downplayed the likelihood that the humanoids will soon be usable in households, and said it was too costly to use them in factories given the low price of labor in China. Instead, he said the robots will first be used as tour guides, sales assistants and office building guides, beginning in Xpeng facilities.
He said that he doesn’t know how many robots Xpeng will sell in the next 10 years, but it will be more than the number of cars.
The humanoid robot uses three of Xpeng’s Turing AI chips and a solid-state battery, with plans for customization options for aspects of the product like body shape and hair style.
Xiaopeng He, CEO of Xpeng, showed off the company’s plan for robotaxis at an event in Guangzhou, China, on Nov. 5, 2025.
CNBC | Evelyn Cheng
Xpeng Co-President Gu said on Wednesday that the company has been developing some technology before Tesla but has not been as vocal in promoting it.
“What we are pursuing from a tech and product perspective, there are some similarities with Tesla…There are some areas that we probably started earlier than Tesla,” Gu said, referring to flying cars and humanoid robots.
Xpeng has developed a flying car product.
But Gu acknowledged that Tesla has done a better and more high-profile job at sharing its commercialization plans, which Xpeng has not done as much until today.
Technology
Toyota raises yearly profit forecast despite an expected $9 billion hit from U.S. tariffs
-
Sports2 years agoStory injured on diving stop, exits Red Sox game
-
Sports3 years ago‘Storybook stuff’: Inside the night Bryce Harper sent the Phillies to the World Series
-
Sports2 years agoGame 1 of WS least-watched in recorded history
-
Sports3 years agoButton battles heat exhaustion in NASCAR debut
-
Sports3 years agoMLB Rank 2023: Ranking baseball’s top 100 players
-
Sports4 years ago
Team Europe easily wins 4th straight Laver Cup
-
Environment2 years agoJapan and South Korea have a lot at stake in a free and open South China Sea
-
Environment1 year agoHere are the best electric bikes you can buy at every price level in October 2024