Another California tech company lays off thousands, citing AI
The layoffs bludgeoning the tech industry continued this week as artificial intelligence reshapes the industry.
Mountain View-based Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, on Wednesday said it was laying off 17% of its workforce, or about 3,000 employees, as part of its restructuring to cut costs and invest in artificial intelligence.
The company said it had slowed down due to “too many organizational layers” and the cuts will simplify the organization to become a “faster, leaner, more focused company.” Intuit said it will close its offices in Reno and Woodland Hills and incur an estimated $300 million to $340 million in restructuring charges.
“We believe we can serve more customers and deliver breakthrough products that fuel our customers’ success by reducing complexity and simplifying our structure,” Sasan Goodarzi, chief executive of Intuit, said in a memo shared with employees.
Intuit announced the layoffs on the same day it reported its third-quarter results, in which revenue jumped 10% from a year earlier, to $8.56 billion.
Intuit adds to the count of more than 114,000 tech-sector employees laid off this year, according to Layoffs.fyi.
Meta laid off 8,000 workers on Wednesday, as the company cuts costs to ramp up investment in AI agents and infrastructure. The ever-expanding list of tech companies that have cut jobs includes Coinbase, Amazon, LinkedIn and more. Some have cited productivity gains enabling fewer workers to accomplish more with AI, while others pointed out restructuring and cost-cutting to prepare for the AI disruption.
In an earnings call, Intuit‘s chief financial officer, Sandeep Aujla, said the cuts were intended to make the organization leaner, and weren’t tied directly to Intuit’s AI use.
“AI is an important part of how we’re evolving as a company, but these decisions were not driven by AI replacing employees,” an Intuit spokesperson reiterated in an email .
Best known for its TurboTax platform, Intuit has branched into accounting with QuickBooks, credit scoring through Credit Karma and email automation via Mailchimp. Facing increased competition for AI-driven tax solutions, the company is integrating AI across its entire portfolio.
“Our AI agents are delivering value at scale, with our accounting AI agents powering recommendations across more than 50 million transactions each week, and business tax AI agents identifying millions of dollars in deductions,” Goodarzi said in the earnings call.
The restructuring will reduce overlapping roles in TurboTax and Credit Karma as the company integrates both into a single team.
A deep sense of anxiety has settled in the tech job market, propelled by consecutive layoffs and coding tasks being automated by AI.
Tech leaders have portrayed the role of human software engineers as a human in the loop, overseeing and verifying AI agents that do the work of coders.
By 2027, software developers are expected to see a 3% job contraction due to AI coding capabilities, according to Labor Automation Forecasting Hub by Metaculus, a popular website where forecasters predict how AI will reshape the workforce.
