What’s driving Oracle’s newest job cuts?
Information that an estimated 30,000 staff are dropping their jobs at Oracle comes at a time that the corporate is claiming to have $533bn in orders to fulfil.
As of Might 2025, the corporate had a workforce of round 165 million staff. Its newest quarterly earnings submitting reveals that the Oracle expects income of $67bn and capital expenditures of $50bn for 2026, which it acknowledged is unchanged from its earlier monetary steerage.
For 2027, its monetary steerage forecasts income of $90bn. Neither the most recent quarterly earnings submitting nor the following earnings name with monetary analysts revealed any adjustments to headcount.
But, in a extensively reported LinkedIn submit, Micheal Shepherd, an AI operations lead at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), reposted messages from a number of colleagues on the firm who mentioned they’ve been made redundant within the newest spherical of job cuts.
One submit, from a safety alert supervisor at Oracle, sums up the state of affairs, stating: “Most of the best possible colleagues have been laid off as effectively. It appears layoffs observe an algorithm of high-level particular person contributors and mid-level managers – particularly these with excellent inventory choices.”
A submit from a former worker – chargeable for managing a staff to make sure Oracle services supplied by the enterprise adjust to requirements resembling PCI-DSS (Fee Card Business Knowledge Safety Customary), HIPAA (Well being Insurance coverage Portability and Accountability Act), PA-DSS (Fee Utility Knowledge Safety Customary) and GDPR (Normal Knowledge Safety Regulation) – described the layoffs as “unprecedented”.
A former principal employees engineer posted: “I’ve fairly a number of associates who have been laid off right now. Prime performers, extraordinarily proficient and actually strong at their job. They only received caught up in a wave.”
One other, who describes himself as a founding engineer at OCI’s File Storage Service, mentioned he has dealt with “numerous on-call shifts and solved numerous issues beneath stress”, throughout his tenure at Oracle.
The posts embody folks with job roles resembling service operations engineer, software program improvement architect and software program improvement supervisor.
Whereas these LinkedIn posts signify only a small snapshot of the job losses on the tech large, they illustrate that the job cuts have affected senior folks, concerned intently in product improvement, safety and regulatory compliance.
On the time of writing, Laptop Weekly had not acquired a response from Oracle about how the job cuts would have an effect on its prospects and product improvement.
Is AI behind the headcount discount?
In the course of the firm’s Q3 FY26 earnings name in March, the corporate reported cloud infrastructure income of $4.9bn, up 84%. On the time, Oracle co-CEO Mike Sicilia spoke about AI serving to the corporate to ship software program faster.
“The usage of AI coding instruments inside Oracle is enabling smaller engineering groups to ship extra full options to our prospects extra rapidly,” he mentioned. “We’re constructing brand-new SaaS [software as a service] merchandise utilizing AI, and embedding AI brokers proper into our present purposes suites.”
Sicilia’s sentiment on the function of AI was just lately mirrored by Steve Miranda throughout his current look on the Oracle AI Tour London occasion. When discussing folks’s function in enterprise useful resource planning software program, he advised AI can exchange sure duties. On the time, Miranda mentioned: “No one is in enterprise to run ERP. The extra we will save them on the ERP aspect, the extra they spend money on what they do.”
Whereas its government management staff clearly has ambitions to deploy AI automation in roles beforehand achieved by people, Forrester principal analyst JP Gownder believes the corporate’s determination to chop jobs is extra targeted on bettering the corporate’s share value.
“When AI replaces staff, an organisation has a vetted, confirmed and deployed AI resolution that may do the job of the workers who misplaced their jobs,” he mentioned. “That’s to say, the work achieved by a human earlier than the layoffs is being achieved by AI the day after the layoff.
“That is uncommon; even huge tech corporations don’t have mature AI brokers that may tackle the myriad duties of dozens of various kinds of jobs that get eradicated. With Oracle, there are monetary pressures to put off employees – the corporate’s inventory has fallen by greater than 50% since Q3 2025.”
What this may occasionally level to is the monetary markets being extra cautious about Oracle’s skill to execute its AI technique, particularly as the corporate just lately introduced it might be looking for to lift $50bn in 2026 utilizing a mix of debt and fairness financing.
