Business Insider cuts 21% of staff in 'all-in on AI' pivot

Business Insider’s chief executive, Barbara Peng, told staff the company was cutting 21% of its workforce across every department, in a memo that framed the move as part of a shift “all-in” on AI rather than a response to a single financial pressure. It was the outlet’s third round of layoffs in three years, following an 8% cut in January 2024, and came under parent company Axel Springer.

Peng cited a combination of causes: declining traffic and revenue in the company’s Commerce vertical, which depended on search-driven affiliate links, and a strategic move toward live events coverage through a new venture, BI Live. She said the company saw “a huge opportunity for companies who harness AI first,” and noted more than 70% of staff were already using an enterprise version of ChatGPT regularly, with full adoption an explicit goal. The company had hired a newsroom AI lead roughly two weeks before the layoffs were announced.

The Insider Union, representing more than 250 editorial staff, and the NewsGuild of New York criticised the cuts as “unacceptable,” calling the announcement a “brazen pivot away from journalism toward greed” and objecting to management promoting AI adoption in the same memo that announced job losses. The union argued flatly that “no AI tool or technology should — or can — take the place of human beings.”

The layoffs were among the clearest instances that year of a newsroom explicitly tying job cuts to AI-driven changes in referral traffic — following widespread reporting that Google’s AI Overviews and similar features were reducing the clicks search once sent to publishers — rather than treating AI adoption and workforce reduction as separate stories.