Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai gestures during a session at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, on January 22, 2020.CEO Sundar Pichai said he wants to make the company 20% more efficient and that could include headcount cuts as it reckons with a slew of economic challenges as well as years of rapid hiring.
Speaking at Code Conference in Los Angeles, Pichai gave more details about how he’s thinking of making the company run more efficiently ahead of economic uncertainty and a broader slowdown in ad spending, of which Google has been the largest beneficiary to date.“The more we try to understand the macroeconomic, we feel very uncertain about it,” Pichai said on stage Tuesday. “The macroeconomic performance is correlated to ad spend, consumer spend and so on," he added.
While he said he views macroeconomic factors as outside of his control, Pichai acknowledged the company has become "slower" after its headcount ballooned. "We want to make sure as a company, when you have fewer resources than before, you are prioritizing all the right things to be working on and your employees are really productive that they can actually have impact on the things they’re working on so that's what we are spending our time on."
What do you bet there is a surge of 'return to office' employees?