Leaders Quit & Employees Laid Off As Enterprise AI Adoption Grows

There’s no question that AI (artificial intelligence) is revolutionizing the world.

From industry operations to movie production, business workflows to personal lives, this technology is reshaping how the globe works and creates.

At the center of all this magic is a small group of AI companies that’s steadily growing as more startups join the roster. This pile is led by OpenAI, the company that introduced the world to its flagship product—ChatGPT—its GenAI-powered (generative artificial intelligence) chatbot.

Despite being at the forefront, OpenAI has faced numerous departures of key leaders, with some joining rivals and others founding their own AI companies to challenge it and explore new avenues.

Notable departures include two AI safety executives: Jan Leike, who joined rivals Anthropic, and Ilya Sutskever, who co-founded a new company called Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI), which raised $1 billion in its first financing round.

This was followed by a mass exodus consisting of Ermira “Mira” Murati (Chief Technology Officer of OpenAI since 2018 joined Thinking Machines), Barret Zoph (VP of Research who also joined Thinking Machines), and Bob McGrew (Chief Research Officer who was with the company for eight years)—all which came at the same time the company announced it was looking to transition to a for-profit company.

Suffice it to say, even leading AI companies aren’t immune to leadership shake-ups, as experts and executives continue shifting across the tech industry.

Now, it’s Meta’s turn.

The company’s head of artificial intelligence research, Joelle Pineau, is leaving the company after spending almost eight years with the social media giant. Announced through a LinkedIn post, Pineau called her tenure “the professional experience of a lifetime!”

Pineau led Meta's Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) group since 2023 and has worked on projects that have enables products such as PyTorch, FAISS, Roberta, Dino, Llama, SAM, Codegen, Audiobox, and others. She leaves at a time when the company is focused on achieving Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI).

While her last day at the company will be May 30, 2025, she has no plan to resume working immediately and will “be taking some time to observe and to reflect, before jumping into a new adventure.”

Talking about her move to leave Meta, Pineau wrote, “Today, as the world undergoes significant change, as the race for AI accelerates, and as Meta prepares for its next chapter, it is time to create space for others to pursue the work. I will be cheering from the sidelines, knowing that you have all the ingredients needed to build the best AI systems in the world, and to responsibly bring them into the lives of billions of people.”


On the other end of the spectrum are employees who have experienced the AI movement as a bittersweet transition.

While it’s helping them improve their performance and productivity, it’s also claiming the jobs of tech workers—directly or indirectly.

2024 saw over 150,000 layoffs across 549 companies as per Layoffs.fyi, while 2025 has racked up around 30,000 job cuts so far—February alone saw approximately 16,000 from 46 companies, while March hit ~8,800 from at least 21 companies.

In the latest round of job cuts, India’s food delivery app Zomato laid off around 500 employees hired under Zomato’s Associate Accelerator Program (ZAAP), its customer training initiative. The move comes as the company looks to integrate AI to automate customer service functions.

ZAAP employees in Gurugram and Hyderabad were told to resign without any formal announcement. Instead, they received messages from senior management saying they were “identified as faulty based on data.” Furthermore, they were instructed to “leave with a smile so that other employees wouldn’t be disturbed.”

Zomato also recently launched its AI-powered customer support platform—Nugget—which consists of AI agents built for speed, scale, and quality. The platform is said to have efficiently managed 80% of inquiries without human intervention, reduced ticket resolution time, and handled more than 15 million monthly interactions across the company’s portfolio of apps, which includes Zomato, Blinkit, and Hyperpure.

This follows job cuts announced by Infosys, one of India’s biggest tech companies, in February, which let go of 300-400 trainees in February after they failed internal assessment tests. More recently, the company is set to lay off another 45 trainees from the same campus.

British company Sky Broadcasting Group revealed it was parting ways with 2,000 workers in the U.K., equaling 7% of its workforce, as the company looks to modernize its customer service operations and build “a future-ready Sky” by embracing a digital approach. The idea is to provide customers with different ways to contact the company 24/7.

“We're transforming our business to deliver quicker, simpler, and more digital customer service,” a spokesperson told AFP.

Adding to this list is India’s BSNL (which is cutting 35% of its workforce or around 18,000 employees), IBM (planning to lay off thousands of employees), Boeing (let go of 180 employees in India), and others.

Do you think AI will claim more jobs, or will these layoffs be offset by new opportunities leveraging AI technology?

Let us know in the comments below!