Photo credit: Joey Rozier/Flickr.com.
Last month Oracle (ORCL) announced impressive third quarter results. The results helped the stock climb 10% in the after-hours trading session. But the stock has still fallen nearly 25% so far this year. Despite the strong financial performance, Oracle’s workforce was not immune to layoffs as it announced a more than 15% reduction in workforce.
Oracle’s Financials
Revenue for the third quarter grew 22% to $17.19 billion, ahead of analyst estimates of $16.91 billion. Net income of $1.79 per share was also ahead of market estimates of $1.70 per share for the quarter.
By segment, its cloud revenue, including infrastructure and SaaS revenues grew 44% to $8.9 billion, ahead of the market consensus of $8.85 billion. Software revenues grew 3% to $6.1 billion, and Services revenues increased 12% to $1.4 billion. Hardware revenues also showed recovery and climbed 2% to $714 million.
Oracle expects to end the current year with revenues of $90 billion, ahead of the analyst estimates of $86.6 billion.
Oracle’s stock is trading at $150.30 with a market capitalization of $413.2 billion. It was trading at a 52-week high of $345.72 in September. The stock hit a 52-week low of $121.24 in April last year.
Oracle’s AI Focus
Like with other tech stocks, the market has been concerned about AI impacting Oracle’s business model. But Oracle is not overly worried. It believes that it is successfully leveraging AI coding tools with developers to accelerate its SaaS business, especially to build solutions that enable entire ecosystems across numerous industries. AI coding tools are helping Oracle enable smaller engineering teams to deliver more complete solutions to its customers more quickly. Besides embedding AI agents into their existing solutions, Oracle is also building new SaaS products using AI. Some of the new applications they have built are focused on CX use cases and support lead generation and qualification, sales orchestration, and automated selling. Oracle claims to have already delivered over 1,000 Oracle-built agents inside its back office and industry applications. These industry focused agents such as the AI-powered integrated EHR is delivering reduced administrative overhead and increased provider satisfaction. They have similar agents deployed in other industries including retail and banking. These capabilities are available to its customers at no additional cost.
Layoffs at Oracle
The increased adoption of AI has also resulted in significant layoffs by Oracle. On March 31st, the company laid off an estimated 18% of its workforce, or 20-30,000 employees globally. India was the worst hit region which saw 12,000 role eliminations from its 30,000-employee count. Business functions that were focused on legacy software maintenance, on-premises support, and traditional SaaS operations saw the deepest cuts. Analysts believe that Oracle announced these measures to rebalance its cash flow into AI-infrastructure development. Oracle is not the only player following this playbook.
As of April 2026, the global tech industry has recorded 78,557 layoffs, with 76.7% occurring in U.S. companies. While giants like Oracle (25,000+), Amazon (AMZN) (16,000), and Block (4,000) lead the charge, a disturbing pattern has emerged.
According to research by Alan Cohen (RationalFX), nearly half of these job losses are now explicitly tied to “AI Restructuring.” However, a deeper analysis suggests that AI is often being used as an “AI-as-an-excuse” narrative to justify aggressive cost-cutting and boost sagging stock prices. Companies like Oracle have automated the termination process itself, firing thousands via 6:00 AM emails—a cold-blooded approach that reflects a total deficit of empathy and human kindness.
The 1Mby1M Perspective: Stop Being the Victim
There is only one permanent solution to this trend of mass layoffs and “AI-driven” displacement: Learn to become an entrepreneur. You don’t have to build a “Unicorn.” You just need to solve a real problem, build a sustainable business, and create your own livelihood. This tsunami of layoffs will continue; paralysis is not a solution. * If you have been laid off: Now is the time to pivot your skills toward a venture you own.
If you still have a job: Now is the perfect time to consider bootstrapping a startup with a paycheck before the next 6:00 AM email arrives.
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