Peacock. >> Google now offering some voluntary buyouts to employees across several divisions, even hitting its core search and advertising units, could be the latest sign of how tech is reshaping its workforce around AI. That is the focus of today’s Techcheck with Deirdre Bosa. This was quite a headline yesterday, Dean. >> It was. Hey Kyle good morning. So quiet restructurings emphasis on quiet. This is the new norm in big tech. It’s part cost discipline part I era reality and making way for a new kind of workforce. Now we’re here at the Databricks Summit in San Francisco. This is an AI startup darling that is competing with the likes of Google and OpenAI for talent. So we’re going to talk to CEO Ali Godsey later today about how he’s shaping his workforce, and whether that means that he’s hiring differently. Now, the interesting part of Google’s latest buyouts is that it’s reaching into its search and ad teams. That is still its core profit engine, suggesting that even those units are being reevaluated in light of new priorities and possibly shrinking headcount needs. In fact, if you look at the trajectory of Alphabet’s hiring over the last few years, it flattened out after pandemic hiring, even with AI ramping. So you see continued revenue growth the top line each quarter, but with less employees. Now, there’s a similar trend at Amazon, Microsoft meta that are also spending big on AI. Earlier sweeping layoffs, they made headlines, but more recently it’s been more of a slow motion reorg through voluntary exits, performance nudges, return to office mandates. Now, Google’s memo makes the subtext pretty clear. And the memo to employees, which are Jen Elias got a hold of, a Google executive wrote. If you don’t feel aligned, this is your exit path. So in other words, stay. If you’re on board with the strategy i.e. AI for everything, leave quietly if you are not. Now Google’s buyouts. They follow comments from its CFO, who said that one of her top priorities this year is cost cutting to offset a surge in AI infrastructure spending. For investors, this could signal operating leverage ahead. In fact, Wedbush calls the search and ads buyouts margin positive, suggesting that AI is ramping fast enough to outrun any near-term slowdown in Google’s core business. Which guys could be a whole separate tech check. I realize, you know, that we are tracking all of the latest data and talking to people on the ground. It is still unclear how well search and ads are really holding up, whether cloud AI gains are enough to offset some of that pressure, or whether it signals a much bigger existential shift. And we just don’t know right now. And that’s probably contributing to the reason why you have this sort of massive shift, but happening very quietly in the workforces across big tech. >> So. So are you saying that you expect some big layoff announcements to come? It’s quiet now, but if the cost cutting continues and the spending. >> Yeah, I mean even Google they did a big layoff, a bigger layoff earlier in the year. And then you know, executives came back and saw how that affected morale. So they’re trying this sort of soft reorganization way for now to see if that works better. But it could signal layoffs ahead. I mean, we showed you the charts of CapEx, how much all these companies are spending. Something’s got to make way for that. But at the same time, you see that these workforces are becoming more efficient thanks to AI tools. So it’s a give and take. And obviously the executives right up to the CFO are watching this very carefully and to see where they can shift. Also keep in mind that the talent wars that are ongoing are taking some very, very big chunks out of financials, right? You get as much as $20 million over four years for a senior AI scientist. So something’s got to give to make way for those kinds of paychecks. >> The last thing was this story in the Journal yesterday, looking at what search is doing to say, the traffic on news sites. And they quote some the head of the Atlantic telling their employees, you basically have to assume that eventually that that traffic diversion from, from Google on search is going to go to zero or near zero. >> And that’s where so much uncertainty is, right? The publishers, the merchants that have become so accustomed to doing it, the old way of the ten blue links and getting paid for that. What happens to them in the AI era? I will tell you that there are whole startups dedicated to this instead of having SEO, right? That’s how you optimize for search. You have something to optimize for AI, and Google itself is experimenting in bigger and bigger ways with how to put advertising, how to ge