Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) and Google chief executive Sundar Pichai said the company is striving to become 20% more efficient and hinted at possible job cuts.
At Code Conference in Los Angeles, Pichai explained how he intends to make the company more efficient in light of economic uncertainty and a slowdown in advertising spending, CNBC reported.
"The more we try to understand the macroeconomic, we feel very uncertain about it," Pichai said. "The macroeconomic performance is correlated to ad spend, consumer spend and so on."
While Pichai maintains macroeconomic factors are beyond his control, he acknowledges that the company has become "slower" as its headcount has risen.
"We want to make sure as a company, when you have fewer resources than before, you are prioritising all the right things to be working on and your employees are really productive that they can actually have an impact on the things they’re working on so that’s what we are spending our time on."
In an internal memo to employees in July he said the company will slow down hiring for the remainder of the year and combine investments where overlaps occur.
READ: Google to slow hiring for rest of 2022
Early in the year, employees had given the company's management particularly poor grades on pay, promotions and execution, citing growing bureaucracy within the organisation.
"Across everything we do, we can be slower to make decisions," Pichai said. "You look at it end-to-end and figure out how to make the company 20% more productive."
Pichai provided specific examples of how he hopes to accomplish this, citing the example of aligning YouTube Music with Google Play Music in the past.
"Sometimes there are areas to make progress [where] you have three people making decisions, understanding that and bringing it down to two or one improves efficiency by 20%," he added.
Alphabet's second-quarter earnings missed estimates as YouTube ad revenue slowed.