Google LLC is laying off yet more staff, just days after announcing it would ax about 1,000 of its employees.

That’s according to a new report by Business Insider, later confirmed by The Verge, which was told by a spokesperson for the company that “a few hundred roles globally are being eliminated.”

According to Business Insider, the latest job cuts were made known by Google Chief Business Officer Philipp Schindler, who circulated a memo on Tuesday that revealed “several hundred” workers from the company’s advertising sales team would lose their jobs.

Schindler reportedly said the shakeup is part of a restructuring effort impacting its Large Customer Sales business unit that sells ads to large enterprises, but reports elsewhere claimed that at least some of the canned workers would be replaced by generative artificial intelligence systems.

“Going forward Google Customer Solutions will be our core channel for scaling growth by dynamically delivering the right treatment to every customer — while LCS will focus on transformational growth for our largest, most sophisticated customers,” Schindler reportedly told employees via the memo.

The announcement comes less than a week after Google revealed it was cutting about 1,000 jobs in its Fitbit, Nest and Pixel product units. The company said in a statement to media it would be letting go of a “few hundred” workers at each of those affected business units

A spokesperson for Google told Business Insider today that the latest job cuts follow the implementation of a “rigorous process to structure our team to provide the best service to our ads customers.” The spokesperson said that process involved mapping customers to the right specialist teams and sales channels to meet their service needs. He added that “a few hundred roles globally are being eliminated and impacted employees will be able to apply for open roles on the team or elsewhere at Google.”

Despite that olive branch, Google staffers were reportedly furious with the announcement. “Thank you, our corporate overlords, for our new annual tradition,” one employee wrote on the company’s internal meme board.

The latest layoffs were predicted by The Information in a report last month, which detailed that many employees in Google’s ad division would likely lose their roles because the company is replacing them with AI programs instead.

The Information explained that Google has been adding tons of generative AI features to Google Ads, its main advertising product, in recent months. These include a natural language chatbot that helps customers to navigate the large selection of ad products it offers, and also a system that can automatically create ad assets such as images and text, based on the budget and goals provided by the ad purchaser.

Ars Technica said in a separate report that Google’s generative AI advertising capabilities are part of a product called “Performance Max,” which helps to optimize performance by constantly tweaking the ads and monitoring its click-through rate as part of a real-time feedback system. Previously, Google would use humans to provide sales guidance, create art assets and decide on advertising layouts, but AI can perform these tasks much more effectively.

Though Schindler didn’t say anything about AI in the memo announcing the latest cuts, the report tallies with a survey of chief executive officers released Monday by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP Global, where a quarter of respondents said generative AI deployments would lead to headcount reductions of at least 5%.

Last year, Google laid off more than 12,000 workers, at a time when many technology companies were looking to reduce costs in anticipation of an economic downturn.

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