Chegg Slashes 45% of Workforce, Blames 'New Realities of AI' (cnbc.com)
- Reference: 0179891786
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/10/28/168237/chegg-slashes-45-of-workforce-blames-new-realities-of-ai
- Source link: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/27/chegg-slashes-45percent-of-workforce-blames-new-realities-of-ai.html
> The online education company, founded 20 years ago, has been hit by the rise of generative AI software tools, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, which have become increasingly popular among students.
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> Chegg also sued Google in February, arguing that AI summaries of search results have hurt its traffic and sales. The company reiterated that claim on Monday, saying AI and "reduced traffic from Google to content publishers" have damaged its business. "As a result, and reflecting the company's continued investment in AI, Chegg is restructuring the way it operates its academic learning products," the company said. The cuts come after Chegg in May [2]laid off 22% of its workforce , citing increasing adoption of AI.
Chegg's market cap has fallen 98.8% in recent years to about $135 million.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/27/chegg-slashes-45percent-of-workforce-blames-new-realities-of-ai.html
[2] https://slashdot.org/story/25/05/12/1649229/chegg-to-lay-off-22-of-workforce-as-ai-tools-shake-up-edtech-industry
No way (Score:2)
It's hard, if not impossible, to think you can fire almost half your employees and not have it royally fuck your business into the mud.
If you CAN let that many people go without disastrous consequences, then those dunderheads have been wildly overstaffed to the point of criminal incompetence.
Troubling (Score:2)
Make all of the snarky comments that you like, this is a frightening canary around the realities of de-generative AI and the new "economies" it is creating. I despise Big Tech as much as the next guy, but at least content creators and businesses saw SOME slice of the advertising-revenue pie. Now these troves of data are going to be used to train AI models and the downstream creators will never see a cent of return (and worse, their infrastructure will be hammered into oblivion by these ruthless crawlers).
T
Re: (Score:2)
"AI Makes Education Industry Unprofitable"