Earlier this week, Grammarly announced that it would be laying off 230 of its employees as part of its ‘business restructuring’ and focus more on advancing ‘the AI-enabled workplace of the future.
This information was shared to the employees in an internal memo by CEO Rahul Roy-Chowdhury.
“To arrive at today’s decision, we took a look at our organizational design and the current skillset of our teams through the lens of our company strategy. As we strengthen our focus toward driving the AI-enabled workplace and deepen our technical investments in AI, we will need a different mix of capabilities and skillsets.”
Redesign Organization
Chowdhury also said that the company was also looking to redesign their organization and improve quality and speed of collaborations and thus, needed to restructure roles and co-locate certain teams.
He also went on to state that the layoffs weren’t a cost-cutting measure and that each laid off employee would get a minimum of three month’s base pay, along with health insurance benefits as applicable to its employees.
Grammarly is just one of the companies to conduct layoffs in the past month. Google, Microsoft, Snapchat, Duolingo and Twitch along others have all conducted layoffs, though not all are attributed to AI.
AI Taking Jobs
The recent layoff of workers by Grammarly and replacing them with AI has further added to the growing fear among many people that the fast advancement of AI could spell doom for their jobs. It also could point towards AI taking jobs as a future that is not too distant despite the fact that AI still remains in its infancy.
AI has been advancing very fast over the past two to three years and it is a concern for many that companies could use the advancement machine learning capabilities to put many people out of jobs.
