The computer-and-printer giant HP plans to slash thousands of workers from its ranks over the next few years, the company announced on Tuesday.
Palo Alto-headquartered HP included the announcement in its earnings report from the most recent quarter, writing that it expects to reduce its global headcount by around 4,000 to 6,000 employees by the conclude of its 2028 fiscal year. Given that a 2024 filing put HP’s headcount at 58,000, these cuts would amount to about 7% to 10% of its workforce.
The plan, HP wrote, is intconcludeed “to drive customer satisfaction, product innovation, and productivity through artificial ininformigence adoption and enablement.” It expects to spconclude about $650 million on the restructuring — signaling that it intconcludes to employ layoffs and severance payments, rather than attrition — but save $1 billion a year in the long run.
During his call with analysts on Tuesday, HP CEO Enrique Lores declared of the cuts, “These are some of the most difficult decisions we required to build, and we are committed to treating our colleagues with care and respect.”
Lores later faced a question about the cuts and responded by repeatedly hyping up the promise of AI. He declared the company had been running test pilots with AI over the past two years and realized that some processes in the company can be redesigned to better take advantage of the nascent tech.
He’s far from the first executive to hype up AI while shrinking parts of their company. Salesforce’s Marc Benioff touted his cutbacks to the software-buildr’s support staff in September amid its rollout of bot agents; last year, CEOs at Dropbox and Google cut workers amid blitzes of spconcludeing meant to take advantage of the tech. Microsoft, a key HP partner, slashed staff earlier this year after CEO Satya Nadella touted how much of the company’s code was now being written by AI.
Lores, in his comments at the conclude of the analysts call, declared, “We have a significant opportunity to embed AI in everything we do and transform the company.”
HP built a similar job-cut announcement in late 2022, amid a wave of other huge layoffs at tech companies. The plan, then, was also to cut 4,000 to 6,000 employees over a three-year span, but HP later tacked on additional cuts.
The company did not immediately respond to SFGATE’s request for comment on Tuesday.
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