Google is set to lay off hundreds of employees in its advertising sales team, the company said on Tuesday.

The news comes less than a week after the company announced that it is cutting hundreds of staff from across its Assistant, hardware and engineering teams.

In an internal memo spotted by Business Insider, Philipp Schindler, Google's chief business officer, told staff that the cuts in the advertising sales unit were the result of changes to how its sales teams operate.

Google is moving staff away from large-customer sales to Google customer-solutions, in effect focusing less on big advertising clients and more on medium-level clients as larger clients are relying less on Google’s resources. The company is also orienting more of its ad business around automation, including through the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to determine how advertisers’ spend should be used.

In his note, Schindler wrote: “Going forward GCS will be our core channel for scaling growth by dynamically delivering the right treatment to every customer – while LCS will focus on transformational growth for our largest, most sophisticated customers.

“While I'm confident we're doing the right thing for our customers, partners, and ultimately for our business, this will be very hard for many, especially across our LCS teams."

In comments to Business Insider a Google spokesperson said: "Every year we go through a rigorous process to structure our team to provide the best service to our ads customers. We map customers to the right specialist teams and sales channels to meet their service needs. As part of this, a few hundred roles globally are being eliminated and impacted employees will be able to apply for open roles on the team or elsewhere at Google."

With AI becoming increasingly central to big tech firms’ long-term strategy, critics have warned that the tech will ultimately lead to the replacement of many human workers.

---