Oracle Cuts Workforce by Roughly 21,000 Amid AI Adoption

Oracle has laid off around 21,000 employees over the past year, amounting to an almost 13 percent decline in its global workforce, with the company admitting that the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) has played a factor.

“As of May 31, 2026, we employed approximately 141,000 full-time employees, of which approximately 49,000 were employed in the U.S., and approximately 92,000 were employed internationally,” Oracle said in a June 22 filing made with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The total job count is roughly 21,000 lower than the 162,000 workers the company employed as of May 31, 2025.

During this period, the U.S. employee count declined by approximately 9,000 while the international count fell by 12,000.

Workforce cuts were implemented across six divisions—cloud and software, sales and marketing, hardware, services, research and development, and general and administrative posts.

The research and development division saw the largest employee exits, resulting in a workforce reduction of around 7,000. Sales and marketing were a close second with around 6,000 exits.

In its latest filing, Oracle said it has a restructuring plan in place, under which it will continue to make “adjustments to our workforce in response to management changes, product changes, performance issues, changes in strategies, acquisitions and other internal and external considerations.”

“We may initiate new restructuring plans in the future. In addition, the adoption and deployment of AI technologies across our operations have resulted, and may continue to result, in reductions to our workforce,” it said.

In fiscal year 2026, Oracle paid nearly $1.84 billion in restructuring and other costs, including employee severance costs. This is up from $374 million in fiscal year 2025.

Shares of Oracle ended Monday at around $175, down 5 percent from Friday’s closing.

Oracle is one of the latest companies to announce AI-driven job cuts. In February, California-based financial services company Block said it was cutting down its workforce from over 10,000 employees to less than 6,000.

At the time, co-founder Jack Dorsey, now the founder of Twitter (now X), said the Block layoffs were due to increased use of AI tools at the company.

Last month, Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase announced it was letting go of around 700 employees—more than 14 percent of the company’s workforce—because AI was “fundamentally changing” how the business operates.

AI Job Loss

According to a June 4 report from outplacement company Challenger, Gray, and Christmas, AI was the top reason for job cuts in May for the third straight month.

AI accounted for 38,579 announced layoffs last month. This is the “highest monthly total ever recorded for the reason since Challenger began tracking it in 2023, and it accounted for 40 percent of all cuts announced in May—up from just 7 percent in January,” the report said.

“For the year, AI has been cited in 87,714 cuts, or 22 percent of all 2026 layoffs, already far surpassing the 54,836 attributed to the reason in all of 2025,” it said.

A March 27 note by the Federal Reserve said there was “no evidence thus far” that industries with higher levels of AI adoption were posting fewer jobs.

On June 22, the European Central Bank released a study describing the overall impact of AI on U.S. employment and wages as “muted.”

According to the bank, the United States has begun adjusting to AI, and the effects of such adoption would be visible earlier in the country than in other major economies.

Meanwhile, the U.S. economy added 172,000 new jobs in May, beating economists’ expectations of 85,000 new job additions, according to June 5 data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Unemployment remained steady at 4.3 percent.

Leisure and hospitality was the sector that created the most jobs last month. Healthcare, social assistance, and local government (excluding education) all reported job additions as well.