September 8, 2022: -Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai stated he wants to make the company 20% more efficient, including headcount cuts as it reckons with a slew of financial challenges and years of rapid hiring.

Speaking at Code Conference in Los Angeles, Pichai offered more details about how he’s thinking of what drives the company to run more efficiently ahead of financial tension and a more general slowdown in ad spending, of which Google contains been the biggest beneficiary to date.

“The more we try to comprehend the macroeconomic, the more we feel uncertain about it,” Pichai said on Tuesday. “The macroeconomic performance is related to ad spend, the consumer spends, and so on,” he added.

While he said he considers macroeconomic factors outside his control, Pichai acknowledged the corporation had become “slower” after its headcount ballooned.

“We want to make sure as a company when you have fewer resources than before, you are prioritizing all the right things to be working on, and your employees are effective that they can have an impact on the things they’re working on so that’s what we are spending our time on.”

Host Kara Swisher asked the CEO how he planned to make the company more efficient, citing “Simplicity Sprint,” a recent internal project launched to re-focus the growing company and “get better results faster,” reported by CNBC in July. While revenue is still developing, the action came after the company reported its second quarter of weaker-than-expected gains and income.

However, before that, workers early in the year had given the company’s leadership bad marks on pay, promotions, and execution, citing the company’s growing bureaucracy, which executives acknowledged now.

“Across everything we do, we can be slower to make decisions,” Pichai said Tuesday. “You look at it ending and figure out how to make the company 20% more productive.”

Pichai also gave more straightforward examples of how he hopes to do that. He gave a past instance of aligning YouTube Music and Google Play Music into one effect.

“Sometimes there are areas to improve you have three people which drives decisions, comprehending that and obtaining it down to two or one improves efficiency by 20%,” he gave in another model.