April 15 (UPI) — Snap Inc., the parent company of messaging and social media app Snapchat, announced Wednesday that it’s cutting up to 16% of its workforce worldwide and plans to use artificial intelligence tools for many tasks. This will affect about 1,000 people and cut about 300 open positions at the company.<\/p>\n
Evan Spiegel<\/a>, the chief executive officer of Snap Inc., said in a memo to staff that AI will allow the company to be more efficient and profitable.\n<\/p>\n “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, CNBC reported<\/a>.<\/p>\n The company’s shares rose about 7% Wednesday after it announced the layoffs. Last month, a portfolio manager from activist investor Irenic Capital Management wrote Spiegel a letter criticizing the company’s strategy and calling on it to cut costs and people by using AI, The Guardian reported<\/a>.<\/p>\n Snap said that AI is already creating about two-thirds of its new code and answering more than a million questions each month, CNBC said. A company spokesperson told CNBC that the decisions to lay off staff members were “incredibly difficult,” but that the changes will “better align our resources behind our highest priorities.”\n<\/p>\n This news is the latest in a trend of companies enacting mass layoffs while turning to AI tools instead. Amazon<\/a>, Oracle, Microsoft, Uber<\/a> and Block are among the companies that have slashed human staff and cited use of AI to make up for the cuts.<\/p>\n Snap had forecast $1.5 billion in revenue for the first quarter of 2026, an increase of 12%. The company, founded in 2011, employed about 5,000 people last year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"April 15 (UPI) — Snap Inc., the parent company of messaging and social media app Snapchat, announced Wednesday…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6254,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[24,321,25,309,5174,134,1829,1129,5411],"class_list":{"0":"post-6253","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ai","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-amazon","10":"tag-artificial-intelligence","11":"tag-business","12":"tag-evan-spiegel","13":"tag-technology","14":"tag-top-stories","15":"tag-u-s","16":"tag-uber"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6253","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6253"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6253\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6254"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6253"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}