General Motors shifts IT departments to AI development: layoffs and new roles

General Motors is making a major shift in its IT strategy: cutting hundreds of employees supporting traditional systems while simultaneously opening new positions for engineers with AI skills. This is not just a staff rotation — it's a signal of how fundamentally demand for IT competencies is changing in large corporations.

What roles are needed

GM is actively seeking specialists in four main directions. First, AI developers and machine learning engineers: people who can build and train neural network systems. Second — data engineers and analysts: specialists working with large volumes of information, building processing pipelines and preparing data for models. Third direction — cloud architects and engineers designing systems on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. And finally, prompt engineering specialists and AI agent developers: people working with large language models and creating automated workflows.

• AI developers and machine learning engineers
• Data engineers and analysts of large data volumes
• Cloud architects (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud)
• Prompt engineering specialists and LLM professionals
• AI agents and automated workflow developers

This is a qualitatively different set of skills. If in the 2000s GM hired specialists to support corporate ERP systems and network infrastructure, now the company is looking for people capable of developing systems that work with data and AI at the scale of automobile production.

What's leaving the old IT

Layoffs affected the bulk of IT employees engaged in supporting legacy systems: network administrators, system administrators, technical maintenance specialists. These are roles that over 15-20 years were considered among the most stable in large corporations. The reason is simple: cloud systems require far fewer people to maintain. AWS, Azure and Google Cloud automate most of the routine work that hundreds of administrators used to do. Companies no longer need armies of IT technicians — they need a handful of qualified cloud architects. But this also reflects a global shift in the IT industry. Simple systems support is becoming a less valuable asset than data development and analytics. GM is investing in the future, not in maintaining the present.

A wave of retraining ahead

For IT professionals around the world, this means the need for urgent retraining. Millions of specialists currently working with traditional systems will hear similar signals from their companies. This will be a wave of retraining comparable to the transition from industrial to digital age.

"This is not just a change in technology — it's a reshuffling of IT

skills that will happen over 5-10 years," technology sector analysts believe.

But it also opens enormous opportunities. Engineers ready to learn AI, cloud technologies and data work will be in very high demand. Demand for these skills far exceeds supply, and salaries in these specialties are rising.

What this means

GM's transition is not an isolated case. Microsoft, Google, Amazon and other tech giants are undergoing similar transformations. This indicates a long-term trend: AI and cloud technologies are moving from the category of innovative projects into the core IT strategy of large companies. For the automotive industry, this is particularly significant: production increasingly depends on data, analytics and automation.