Google CEO Sundar Pichai blamed himself and an altered economic reality for the company's plans to slash 12,000 jobs of "people we worked hard to hire."

Pichai explained in an email to employees that Google has seen "dramatic growth" over the past two years, which led to the layoff decisions for which he takes full responsibility. "We hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today," he said.

The CEO stated that advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) also impacted the move, noting that "being constrained in some areas allows us to bet big on others. Pivoting the company to be AI-first years ago led to groundbreaking advances across our businesses and the whole industry," he wrote.

Those early investments have created a significant opportunity for the company in terms of AI, which is why he maintains a sense of optimism "about our ability to deliver on our mission."

Pichai's AI statement was similar to that of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who earlier this week announced plans to cut 10,000 jobs at the computing and cloud giant.

According to an email Nadella sent to employees, those 10,000 jobs are no longer needed to meet the cloud hyperscaler’s long-term goals or customer demand – especially in light of the continued AI advancements and shuttered enterprise spending caused by economic uncertainty.

Microsoft, which invested $1 billion in 2019 in OpenAI – the company behind the viral AI natural language processing model ChatGPT – expects the next wave of computing will be “born with advances in AI,” Nadella wrote to employees, suggesting automation and AI are primed to limit the cloud provider's need for human headcount.

Nadella's economic uncertainty angle was echoed by Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, who in a note with his employees tied to plans to slash 18,000 jobs, explained “this year’s review has been more difficult given the uncertain economy and that we’ve hired rapidly over the last several years.”