Business Insider layoffs hit as company shifts strategy and doubles down on AI

Business Insider announced Thursday that the company will be shrinking the size of its newsroom and making layoffs, impacting over a fifth of its staff. 

“We are reducing the size of our organization, a move that will impact about 21% of our colleagues and touch every department,” Business Insider CEO Barbara Peng said in an internal memo obtained by Fox News Digital. “This will be a difficult day, and our first priority is to provide clarity and support to those colleagues whose roles are being eliminated.” 

Peng announced 18 months ago a new strategy centered on being the leading outlet for journalism on innovation, tech and business. 

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Business Insider to lay off a fifth of its staff. (Photo: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

“Since Jamie Heller joined as EIC at the end of last year, we’ve made great progress — we’ve sharpened our standards and are shifting towards more reporting that is authoritative and matters deeply to the people who read it,” Peng said. “We’ve doubled the amount of original reporting we publish and have substantially increased engagement in the past months.”

The outlet will also be “exiting the majority of our Commerce business, given its reliance on search, and maintaining a few high performing verticals,” as well as launching a platform called BI Live, which they say will be an area for promoting their journalism and connecting directly with their readers. 

Peng added that the company is “fully embracing AI,” as 70% of the company’s staff currently uses Enterprise ChatGPT, with a goal of 100%. 

“In the past year, we’ve launched multiple AI-driven products to better serve our audience — from gen-AI onsite search to our AI-powered paywall — with new products set to launch in the coming months,” Peng said in the memo.

She said they are looking at how AI “can boost operations across shared services, helping us scale and operate more efficiently. Change like this isn’t easy. But Business Insider was born in a time of disruption — when the smartphone was reshaping how people consumed news. We thrived by taking risks and building something new.”

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Business Insider CEO Barbara Peng said that the company is “fully embracing AI,” as 70% of the company’s staff currently uses Enterprise ChatGPT, with their goal being 100%.  (Jaque Silva/NurPhoto via Getty Images / Getty Images)

Peng told her staff that the changes will “take time to process.”  

Staff were directed to discuss the changes during team meetings on Thursday morning. 

A statement from the Insider Union and The NewsGuild of New York decried the layoffs, specifically calling out Axel Springer, a German publisher that owns Business Insider. 

“Axel Springer is a multi-billion dollar firm whose digital outlets and media businesses generate the majority of its revenue,” the statement read. “The layoffs of our talented co-workers and union members is another example of Axel Springer’s brazen pivot away from journalism toward greed.”  

Fox News Digital reached out to Business Insider for comment, and were referred back to Peng’s announcement. 

Axel Springer is a German publisher that owns Business Insider.  (Photo by Monika Skolimowska/picture alliance via Getty Images / Getty Images)

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