On April 24, 2025, Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan sent a letter to employees outlining key changes to the company’s strategy and structure. The letter was part of a broader transformation aimed at improving efficiency and positioning Intel in an increasingly competitive semiconductor market.
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Intel’s CEO has announced that employees will be working in the office from three to four days a week as the company cuts “unnecessary bureaucracy,” reduces team sizes, and reduces “labor-intensive corporate administrative tasks like non-essential training and documentation.”
These and other job changes are detailed in a memo from Tan to employees released by the company. Intel also hints that job cuts, which have been rumored before, will soon begin, but decisions on them will come from individual Intel executives rather than as part of the company’s overall workforce reduction program.
«“We have learned some valuable lessons from past actions. We must balance our reductions with the need to retain and hire key talent. I will empower each of my leaders to make the best decisions possible that align with our top priorities,” Tan wrote in the memo.
But he doesn’t appear to be leaving the process unchecked. “I was surprised to learn that in recent years the most important KPI for many Intel managers has been the size of their teams. That will no longer be the case. I am a big believer in the philosophy that the best managers do the most with the least amount of people,” Tan said in the document. The CEO said the layoffs will begin within the next few months, likely in the second quarter.
Intel has said it hopes to save an additional $0.5 billion in 2025 alone compared with previous targets, and even more in 2026. Reuters reported last month that Tang plans to significantly change Intel’s chip manufacturing and cut what Tang calls “a bloated and slow layer of middle management.” That message appears to have been accurate. During the earnings call, Tang said he’s also tasked teams with finding $2 billion they can save on capital expenditures.
In his first public statement in March, Tang said his Intel would be an “engineering-driven company” that would “take calculated risks to achieve breakthroughs and leaps in the future.” Now he says he will do that, in part, by simplifying the organization: “All the critical functions related to products, manufacturing, and management that were spread across two or three layers now report directly to me.”
«Organizational complexity and bureaucracy stifled the innovation and agility we needed to win. Decisions took too long. New ideas and the people who generated them lacked the space and resources to incubate and grow. Unnecessary structures led to poor performance. I am here to fix that,” Tan promised.
When talking about Intel’s overall strategy, Tan said it was “too early to give away all the details,” but shared several priorities for the company to pursue, including: building best-in-class products again, taking a holistic approach to redefining the portfolio to optimize products for new and evolving AI workloads, enabling the next wave of compute driven by reasoning models, agent AI, and physical AI, and building wafers that meet customer requirements.