Snap Inc blames AI as it lays off 1,000 workers

Snapchat’s parent company plans to lay off 16% of its employees, around 1,000 people, citing “rapid advancements in artificial intelligence”, the social media company told staff on Wednesday in an internal memo. The staff reduction is part of a wave of tech industry layoffs in the past year, with many firms blaming AI for the cuts.

Snap Inc’s layoffs follow demands last month from Irenic Capital Management, an activist investor whose portfolio manager wrote a letter to Snap Inc CEO, Evan Spiegel, calling on him to reduce costs and headcount while criticizing the company’s current strategy. In Spiegel’s memo to staff, he claimed that the layoffs would move Snap towards profitability and suggested that artificial intelligence could fill the lack of human labor.

“While these changes are necessary to realize Snap’s long-term potential, we believe that rapid advancements in artificial intelligence enable our teams to reduce repetitive work, increase velocity, and better support our community, partners, and advertisers,” Spiegel wrote.

Snap, which owns the photo and video sharing app Snapchat, joins a host of other tech companies that have carried out mass layoffs amid the AI boom. Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle, Jack Dorsey’s financial services firm Block and others have cut tens of thousands of jobs while embracing a shift towards AI tools and claiming that the technology allows for businesses to do more with less human labor.

Although Spiegel’s memo stated that the company had already seen productivity benefits from AI, many experts and workers believe that the reality of receiving gains from implementing AI is murkier. Former workers and even pro-AI executives have also sometimes accused firms of “AI-washing” layoffs in an attempt to posture for investors and the market. Marc Andreesen, a venture capitalist and AI booster, similarly claimed recently that AI-related cuts were being used as an excuse for firms that had overstaffed.