Intel Will Outsource Marketing To Accenture and AI, Laying Off Its Own Workers
- Reference: 0178124631
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/25/06/21/0251208/intel-will-outsource-marketing-to-accenture-and-ai-laying-off-its-own-workers
- Source link:
> The company said it believes Accenture, using artificial intelligence, will do a better job connecting with customers. It says it will tell most marketing employees by July 11 whether it plans to lay them off. "The transition of our marketing and operations functions will result in significant changes to team structures, including potential headcount reductions, with only lean teams remaining," Intel told employees in a notice describing its plans. The Oregonian/OregonLive reviewed a copy of the material.
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> Intel declined to say how many workers will lose their jobs or how many work in its marketing organization, which employs people at sites around the globe, including in Oregon. But it acknowledged its relationship with Accenture in a statement to The Oregonian/OregonLive. "As we [2]announced earlier this year, we are [3]taking steps to become a leaner, faster and more efficient company," Intel said. "As part of this, we are focused on modernizing our digital capabilities to serve our customers better and strengthen our brand. Accenture is a longtime partner and trusted leader in these areas and we look forward to expanding our work together."
[1] https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2025/06/intel-will-outsource-marketing-to-accenture-and-ai-laying-off-many-of-its-own-workers.html
[2] https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1738/lip-bu-tan-our-path-forward
[3] https://slashdot.org/story/25/06/16/2132227/intel-will-lay-off-15-to-20-of-its-factory-workers-memo-says
Re: (Score:2)
I bought my first ARM64 laptop last year, and while it's not 100% there yet - particularly in terms of performances for heavy desktop apps - it's a very convincing alternative to the traditional x86 stuff.
Re: (Score:1)
I just bought a Dell Latitude 7455, Snapdragon CPU, Adreno GPU and it's on Windows 11, I have found it to be extremely good for all my needs, I do coding mostly but some light gaming, video playback and browsing too, Somehow it can run World Of Warcraft at an acceptable frame rate! I have Steam on here but not tried any games yet, Now my Alienware M18 is faster by every possible measure, Possibly significantly faster in some, however one doesn't always need all that power and it comes at the cost of a massi
Re: (Score:2)
Mine's an [1]MNT Reform [mntre.com]. Even fully loaded, its performances are lackluster at best. Think entry-level laptop from 5 years ago kind of perforrmances. Or maybe top-of-the-line Raspberry Pi. But performance is not the point of this machine.
Still, sluggish though it is, it's quick enough for 95% of what I do. And since I'm not into modern games, it works fine for me for gaming too.
[1] https://shop.mntre.com/products/mnt-reform
Re: (Score:2)
Which one did you buy? Can you install a generic Linux distro on it? SBBR compliant? UEFI? The biggest thing preventing me from buying arm has always been the funky boot loaders, devicetree, and vendor-specific kernel forks. And RISC-V has all the same issues.
Re: Whatever (Score:2)
Look up what "rereading upmarket" means.
Re: Whatever (Score:2)
"Retreating upmarket".....ugh.
Enshittification progress (Score:2, Insightful)
0%...10%...20%...30%...40%...50%...60%...70%...80%...90%...%100
Complete.
Have a nice day!
Re: (Score:2)
What do you mean? People love AI slop!
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> What do you mean? People love AI slop!
Correction: Investors loved AI slop!
Re: (Score:2)
Sigh, no mod points for me today... This is on target.
See also the comments on AI in restaurants: [1]https://slashdot.org/story/25/... [slashdot.org]
[1] https://slashdot.org/story/25/06/20/1954245/applebees-and-ihop-plan-to-introduce-ai-in-restaurants
Marketing is a logical thing to outsource (Score:3)
Few companies that do something else, are actually good at marketing.
With that said, I'm not sure Accenture is a go-to name for marketing, they're more of a staff augmentation company. Not sure they'll be much better at it than Intel itself.
Re:Marketing is a logical thing to outsource (Score:4, Interesting)
I did a job at Accenture's office in SF and in a hallway there's a timeline of accomplishments and in the early 90's they take credit for the idea of "dynamic airline ticket pricing", so Accenture is the innovator (or to blame) for the fact that you will see different prices with different browsers and for different people and frankly so yeah take from that what you will about the kind of company they are dealing with.
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If Accenture didn't invent it, somebody else would have.
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> If Accenture didn't invent it, somebody else would have.
I think their point is that Accenture is proud to have "innovated" that idea.
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Yeah, OK. IMO they deserve neither the credit, nor the blame.
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I don't think blame is the right way to describe it, just kind of funny in a sad way since here on an innovation board is something that I would say maybe 90% of the population if you polled them on that would say they don't like it.
I can't recall but has any of us here ever felt we saved significant money or the purchasing and flight process better because of this, I guess the folks who's job it is to maintain these things, they like it, feels like just a thing that only really exists to add some percentag
Re: (Score:3)
> If Accenture didn't invent it, somebody else would have.
This was actually invented by a guy sitting on a rug in the Middle East about 4000 years ago.
"For you?? ... Mmmm, I would give you the goat for twenty pieces of silver. Take or leave."
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> so Accenture is the innovator (or to blame) for the fact that you will see different prices with different browsers
I for one thank Accenture for setting up a system where Internet Explorer users subsidise cheap tickets for Firefox users. And yes that was literally the outcome of it. We ran Slashdot stories back in the day of how IE would give you a higher ticket price.
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They're cheap and while Intel is facing real competition marketing isn't where they make their sales they make their sales with nasty little backroom deals that should probably be investigated as the antitrust violations that they are.
I will say that every single local business around me has stopped using regular people in their ads and just uses AI now. As a tech nerd it's a huge turn off because I associate AI with scams but I'm not sure regular people are that plugged in or that the critical thinking
Lean mean... (Score:4, Funny)
"To go faster, I'll cut off my legs. Smaller frontal area, 33% mass redu cion. Big bonus on the horizon" Wise beancounter.
Stock BuyBacks (Score:2)
Trump is getting ready to collapse the economy and everybody knows it. The bond market is going to take a huge shock when Trump Rams through those 7 trillion dollars in tax cuts coupled with $800 billion dollars in Medicaid cuts.
Remember that's $800 billion it's going to exit the economy. Also half of all rural hospitals will be closing.
There's a reason why the big beautiful bill doesn't really go into effect until after the midterm elections.
When all that hits every major corporation is going t
Wait, what? (Score:2)
> The transition of our marketing and operations functions will result in significant changes
I can sort of see outsourcing marketing but to, y'know, a marketing company.
However, outsourcing of operations is going to be grab-the-popcorn levels of interesting...
Re: Wait, what? (Score:2)
The only way I can rationalize such an outwardly dumb decision is he legitimately doesn't know what the company will look like a year from now. So they're going to remove as many of the outside layers as they can to expose the core buisness, then as that reconfigures its the contractors headache to manage the impacts. Eventually when you hit a stable buisness model you can bring the work back in house.
Or... its to enable easy scrapping and selling of the company for parts if he can't get market traction. Le
Re: (Score:2)
Are there any unions in play? Because outsourcing something like operations sounds like one way you might get rid of a union and replace it with underpaid contractors.
Circling the drain (Score:2)
With every passing month it's getting more difficult to see any way Intel can get out of this mess they're in.
riches be trippin' (Score:5, Insightful)
I have noticed that, after the bizbros get into power, and announce that they're gonna "increase shareholder value", and you ask them how they're gonna do that, the answer is never, ever "make the product suck less". The answer is ALWAYS "fire workers in the Western Hemisphere and slowly outsource every single business unit and hire bizbros to tell us that that was a smart thing to do and to do more of it, until we don't actually have a business any more, because we outsourced it all away, then blame it on the economy."
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Another post where I wish I had moderator points today....
Re:They make chips. (Score:5, Insightful)
But outsourcing to Accenture seems a sure path to wasting a lot more money than previously.
Re:They make chips. (Score:4, Insightful)
It sounds like they've firmly planted their feet on the road to oblivion.
Re:They make chips. (Score:4, Insightful)
Yup. This is an extremely bad sign. Accenture are a cancer. They are so parasitic and don't really care if they kill their host. They exist entirely to increase their presence within a company and extract as much value from the host as possible.
Re: They make chips. (Score:2)
The bullshit-o-meter will reach new levels, especially when using AI.
Anyone that have seen the AI suggestions from Google search results will know how bad it can get.
Re: (Score:2)
> But outsourcing to Accenture seems a sure path to wasting a lot more money than previously.
This is Intel we're talking about. Their marketing team literally could not be any worse than it was. Even if it costs more to get Accenture to do it it still would waste less money than what the incompetent idiots at Intel did. Like, they had marketing so incredibly bad that they attempted to erase it from the internet after being called out on it, the "Core truths" campaign which really should have just been named "core lies".