GM lays off hundreds of IT workers as automaker pivots to AI-native engineering
General Motors has laid off hundreds of workers from its US-based technology teams, TechCrunch reported. The automaker said the move is part of a plan to rebuild a more AI-native engineering organisation. Some of the positions GM is now hiring for focus on AI-native development, data engineering and analytics, cloud-based engineering, agent and model development, prompt engineering and new AI workflows.
GM Chief Executive Mary Barra told staff in a memo that "software and AI are critical to the future of our industry." Barra called the layoffs "difficult but necessary," describing them as a structural change required to give the company a faster engineering cycle. The number of new hires under the new framework has not been publicly disclosed.
Industry analysts described the move as part of a broader wave of restructuring among legacy automakers. Ford, Stellantis and Volkswagen Group have each announced similar moves in the past 12 months. In every case, the focus has been on software engineering, autonomous-driving data pipelines and agent-based vehicle software architectures.
GM has continued autonomous-driving work through its Cruise subsidiary, which was paused for about a year following a 2023 San Francisco incident. Cruise reopened in 2025, with a narrower scope. During that pause some Cruise software staff moved into GM's broader technology arm; some are reportedly among those affected by the latest cuts.
The TechCrunch report said most of the workers affected were veterans of corporate IT, legacy systems maintenance and internal application development. A group of former employees posted on LinkedIn that "the industry's talent pool is shifting fast; older skill sets are now lower-demand."
The shift is a concrete data point in the broader rise in demand for AI-related skills. According to US Bureau of Labor Statistics data, AI-related job postings grew about 60 percent year-on-year between 2024 and 2025. Automotive companies account for roughly 8 percent of those listings.
GM's decision drew responses from labour groups. A United Auto Workers spokesperson said the union felt the company's "retraining and placement programmes were insufficient" given the structural nature of the change. UAW described GM's internal training as "inadequate to the AI transition."
In response, GM announced an internal AI training platform. The company said it would offer remaining technical staff a three-month programme covering prompt engineering and LLM-based development. The training is expected to ease the transition for current employees into new roles.
Wall Street's reaction was mixed. JP Morgan analysts said the structural change should produce short-term operating savings but warned that building an AI-native technical roster will not be easy. Average compensation for an engineer who fits the "AI-native" description sits around 1.8 times the level of a comparable traditional IT developer.
The automotive sector's AI-native hiring push is concentrated in autonomous driving, production-line optimisation, software-defined vehicles and customer-service agents. Internal documents seen by TechCrunch suggest GM's first cohort of AI-native engineers will be working on a generation of software intended to ship into production vehicles in late 2026.