Google is reportedly planning to restructure the ad sales department of the company due to the increasing role of artificial intelligence (AI) in operations. This has sparked concerns that there can be a hefty layoff coming in the ad sales unit of Google, which consists of 30,000 people.

A report from The Information said that the recent AI developments will lead to significant job displacement at Google soon. The tech company is planning to automate certain jobs in the ad sales and customer service department, the report said.

The decisions to lay off certain number of employees were reportedly discussed during a department-wide Google Ads meeting. This comes after Google had unveiled its “new era of AI-powered ads”, where Google was introducing conversational ads.

The AI ads initiative by Google will give access to artificial intelligence for scanning websites and automatically generating keywords, coming up with headlines, images and other aspects of the advertisement.

AI tools have gained major popularity in the last few years, with Google’s own artificial intelligence division Google AI conducting multiple researches and studies on how to smooth out functioning of the company through AI tools.

CEO Sundar Pichai on Google layoffs

After one whole year of the company’s biggest layoff, CEO Sundar Pichai recently opened up to what led to the difficult decision and how has the company been performing since. Pichai said that after the layoffs, morale has taken a major hit.

However, Pichai defended the layoffs by saying that if a certain amount of people weren’t let go, it would have been a “worse decision down the line” for the firm, describing the decision as “difficult but necessary”.

The Google CEO said, “It would have been a major overhang on the company. I think it would have made it very difficult in a year like this with such a big shift in the world to create the capacity to invest in areas.”