TomTom to cut 10% of jobs due to improved automation
tomtom.com
tomtom.com
I was there when Google started offering turn by turn navigation for free. Other issue was live traffic information. As you might imagine all this caused some concern among employees because that was, I think, the main source of revenue for the company.
They were already doing some other stuff like fitness wearables but they didn't seem to be leaning into it.
Main idea for staying in business, since you can't compete with free, was to go deeper into cooperation with car manufacturers to provide builtin navigation in cars. They were already doing it back then, I think, but they've seen their salvation in capturing bigger part of that market.
I was a software developer there, employed in projects pretty far from their core business, but I learned there a lot about how companies become corporations why they can and do run like a headless chicken, spilling money left and right. It's basically about survival. Company becomes a corporation when it randomly discovers a gold vein in the economy. For TomTom this gold vein was maps on portable computers. This gold vein brings in absolutely insane amount of money. Then this money needs to be spent on doing a lot of unrelated inefficient discovery work wasting huge amount of money so they have a chance of finding next gold vein before shifting sands of economy and human development burry the original one.
From what I see shared in this thread, TomTom still haven't found their second gold vein.
Maybe I should get hired there again. A lot of my friends from other jobs work there now. I never seen from the inside how corporations die.
And played no small role in shaping the ecology (Android to keep abreast of mobile, Pixel to reduce hardware monopoly) to ensure that gold vein grew.
I don't really understand how one supports this claim without using decidedly non-standard definitions and grouping of revenue. If you insist on lumping together separate, wildly-successful revenue-generating products into overbroad groups by the manner in which the revenue is collected, and ignore a couple of objectively enormous revenue streams: Do you similarly feel that Apple "hasn't found a second gold vein" beyond "hardware sales"?
Either way that will never happen obviously; Why would an ISP “block ads”? They’re literally hosting Google hardware (specifically YouTube’s cache)
I guess they may be doing that to save bandwidth... They also have a tendency to offer features that few of their subscribers use, or even know about (some of their routers come with built-in VPN servers and torrent seedboxes).
In French: https://www.universfreebox.com/article/19260/Comment-fonctio...
"Pay 5 euros per month for the ad-blocker privacy feature!"
They could probably make a lot of money from this.
Google could circumvent this if ISPs tried this.
How would an ISP block ads coming in encrypted as normal content?
This would solve Google's immediate problem, but it's such a huge escalation that I expect lots of unintended effects not to Google's benefit. There is a reason they haven't done this, despite widespread adblocking use.
I also expect Google to double down on Chrome Manifest v3 limitations if ad-blocking keeps getting more popular. Or even using DNS-over-HTTPS as a default on Chrome if ISP blocking ever becomes a thing.
This one seems more up to date, apparently the owner is scraping from somewhere: https://github.com/dotspencer/block-admiral
Right now, with normal web advertising, the publisher (person with a website who wants to sell ads) tells your browser to go get an ad from the advertiser (the person paying for the ads), and that means that the advertiser gets a web request every time their ad is sold. This means that they can implement their own analytics and do not have to trust the publisher's, because the publisher merely kicks off the ad delivery process.
However, this requires separate domains or IP addresses, which can be blocked even at the network level[0] with a Pi-Hole. The alternative would be to serve ads straight off the publisher's site, which is how most social networks do it. Except... now you've just cut off every advertiser's data spigot[1]. If you do that, web advertising stops working - not because it's harder to target users, but because it's impossible to verify that you are paying for legitimate traffic to your website.
This is not a hypothetical. Social media companies already implement publisher delivery, and there have been multiple times in which they[2] themselves have admitted that their analytics and attribution were just plain wrong. That meant that advertisers were paying for traffic they never actually got. Publishers have an inherent incentive to inflate their traffic; the ad networks call this "click fraud" and it's when you run a bunch of bots to click on ads so you make more money[3].
The end of separate-domain advertising takes us right back to the days of television, where advertisers were buying specific time slots ("inventory") from specific publishers they trusted. The way that said inventory was priced was through random sampling of television watchers; but that relied on asking people to accurately record their TV watching habits. Good luck doing that when ads are served on a request-by-request basis.
Yes, you could randomly sample web users by having them install an extension that scans all their traffic and generates an equivalent log, but that almost certainly violates every extension repository's rules. Remember how Facebook was caught using their In-House signing cert to ship an iPhone VPN that did just that? That's the sort of sketchy shit we're talking about here. And any rules for detecting and reporting which ads were viewed could also be extracted and used to generate a tool for blocking said ads, which would be counter-productive.
So, basically, the reason why we don't just have publishers delivering ads is because it shuts out smaller publishers from selling them and puts advertisers solely at the mercy of Google and Facebook to verify that they actually got what they paid for. It would be a monopolistic power play few would tolerate.
[0] DoH and encrypted SNI complicates things, since it was also intended to be censorship-resistant - and we're trying to censor advertisements. However, you cannot encrypt IP addresses without taking on all of the inefficiencies of Tor onion routing. And you can also configure your web browser to just use the Pi-Hole's DNS instead of a public DoH server.
[1] Yes, there is an argument that telling the user's browser to make a request to another server is not "sending data"; this argument is stupid.
[2] Minimally, Facebook and Twitter; though other socials probably have the same problem.
[3] This is also why Google's antispam teams are secret police
But you are right. This could motivate them to move to a single domain for all Google content. But this is just another escalation in the adblock arms range. uBlock-style blockers would proliferate.
Youtube, Android, Google Search on iOS, ChromeOS. All of it is a moat to protect the first.
Citation needed... Is $7B/quarter not a lot of money?
I still don't see where the GP comment's confidence that it's not meaningfully profitable comes from. It doesn't seem like an uncontroversial assumption that costs have more than septupled in the last five years in the way that revenue has.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/viewers-dont-add-up-to-profit-f...
Otherwise just saying advertising is a gold vein would mean people that put up a blank page with a single ad on it and no reason to visit would definitely not be a gold vein. So as others mentioned, its the Youtube and Gmails level products.
I don't believe it was clear who said this, how confident it was that someone said this, and whether it was an off-the-cuff comment in support of a push for more growth or an actual deep assessment of the economics of the space.
Sadly, it's pants. It comically announces caution stationary traffic on the M25, generally after we've been stationary for 5 minutes. The navigation directions aren't as good and Google is just so much better at door to door directions to a named destination. Others will get you close to your destination and you have to work it out. Google will, more often than not, take you to the correct carpark.
With Android Auto displaying on the dash it's not even a competition.
Of course, mobile apps have definitely caught up years ago, and I believe you that they're even better now.
First, the car doesn't download map data. I'm stuck with what was on the car when I bought it unless I want to pay an unreasonable amount to update it.
Second, it does download traffic data, but it's so slow that it's useless. I took its advice once and it cost me over an hour, because the alternate route had already filled up and had the disadvantage of not being a freeway.
Third, it can't navigate a path without connecting to the satellite (seemingly for traffic data, but possibly it isn't even calculating the path locally). So when I visit downtown SF, don't have up-to-date maps, and I'm inevitably behind some building blocking my southern view, it just abandons me.
Apparently car navigation maps are a thing that you can also pirate. I think I saw a Windows tool for downloading Mercedes-Benz map updates. Never tried it though, since I was pretty content to sticking with Google Maps and a phone mount.
I’m confused by what you are saying here. In-car navigation use satelites to know where the car is. If it can’t path plan without satelite connection then that is most likely because it is waiting for a localisation fix.
Trafic information could be coming through satelite broadcast but I doubt that it does.
There is no way that a navigation tool would receive path planning through satelite. Two way communication is much more complicated than one-way reception, and there is no way it would be financially worth doing that.
Absolutely - Google is just one player, Apple Maps, Bing Maps, OSM.
Charging consumers 300$/year for map updates would never work even if free offerings didn't exist - they are just targeting a small niche and optimizing (ie. even if they made the price 30$/year most people would still use phone maps so they might as well milk the market that wants to pay for their solution as high as they can). If there were no free competitors someone would drive the mass market price down way lower than 300$.
The built in unit for your car is a captive market, they're definitely gouging. Especially nowadays when it's almost impossible to replace them with an aftermarket unit due to how integrated they have become.
How else would it work? Just sense which way the wheels are pointing and track the speedometer?
It should use the last known location and vector to find a route. It doesn't. My guess is that it loses the satellite, sees it again and starts recalculating, loses it, and repeats this cycle. Unless the satellite is visible for a long enough period, it never produces any path. Even an out-of-date path would be more useful than simply nothing.
[1] Pre-GPS systems used this https://ndrive.com/brief-history-gps-car-navigation/
Edit: Ah, I see, I meant something sort of other than that read. I've certainly had the experience of not being able to download maps, but mostly on hikes in the middle of nowhere. When I use navigation on foot in the city, hadn't had the problems I have with in-car nav.
The updates and traffic information is, or at least was, free.
Maybe this is because I don't commute by car though. If I get stuck in traffic, it's the one time that month, and I've probably got a podcast on anyway.
Mind you, I've never seen this properly confirmed :)
What a drag.
Apple CarPlay + Apple Maps checks all of those boxes in my car.
Just as a quick note, when I use Apple Maps via CarPlay on my 2020 Subaru it does display the next turn on the instrument cluster. This doesn't work with Google Maps via CarPlay, so it might be a private CarPlay API that only Apple's first-party apps can use.
You bought it. That's enough for them.
The car's maps are not as up to date as Google's - they miss some road closures, do not have some businesses names so need to enter address (or can just send a location from Google Map to the car), sometimes believe a street is one-way even if it is not or try to make a turn that does not exist any more but I can deal with an occasional glitch every few months instead of dealing with the inferior UI all the time.
I feel like this is a dying market as well. Why would I pay $200/year to update the maps in my car's mediocre navigation system when I can just turn on Apple CarPlay/Android Auto and get the same excellent navigation system I enjoy on my smartphone?
Even so, both Google and Apple seem to predict your location when signal drops. Somehow I still get decent navigation when I am in the middle of nowhere Iowa and have no cell service. Obviously the maps are cached, but somehow it knows I'm still moving. Must be accelerometer and gyroscope? IDK
I'd really like dash HUD integration with CarPlay.
Aren't all companies corporations?
Of course, politics and personal interests. But sometimes it's just better to allocate resources to something where they're better utilized.
If the stock price gets too high, they always dilute it by issuing new shares to raise money for new projects. So you're never expecting lots of appreciation.
There's hundreds of them, and also many private REITs that are unlisted with the same fundamental idea.
Oil, utilities, REITs, small business lenders, etc. all have investors expecting management to just sit there, don't kill the golden goose, and pay regular dividends.
It doesn't really happen in practice, because no "visionary CEO" will say "we couldn't come up with a better idea than what we are doing now, so let's just call it a day in terms of exploring other ideas, and focus on this one product".
My current company is a retail company with both lots of physical locations and web shop/mobile app. We always try to come up with features that users can use in the physical stores, and those features get practically zero traction. Nobody is willing to say that the people who go to the stores, in a big percentage, won't use our apps, and the people who use the apps/web shop don't care about the physical stores. Every product person wants to combine these two, and I don't understand why.
(I guess, that's why I'm not in charge of business decisions :))
Or an opportunity. They should see the private equity firms coming in as a signal it's time to jump ship and not liquidate their stocks (actually, renegotiate your ESPP while you look out for the next thing!).
Because corporations are organisations (that develop some bureaucracy) and the main existential purpose of every bureaucratic organisation is to survive and grow. No corporation will just voluntarily die I think. First it will be sold, reorganized, reimagined, reinvented, downscaled, pivoted and all that good stuff.
It's doubtful that TomTom's foray into mobile was 'accidental' and it's also hard to understand how much money is being spent, and the risks involved in finding other revenue streams.
When mega corps come in and suddenly make a major part of your business unworkable, yes, companies go into reactionary mode. That's normal.
They started as a small company writing random software for palmtops. Until one day they made mapping software. They didn't expect it will be that popular with people. It was popular to a degree that people were buying palmtops just to use their app and didn't care about all other software their new palmtop could have.
It's as if today, small software shop released an app that bumps iPhone device sales by +20% just because people want to use that one app event though they don't care about all other things iPhone can do. Everybody can dream of that, but nobody can plan for that. It was purely accidental.
> When mega corps come in and suddenly make a major part of your business unworkable, yes, companies go into reactionary mode. That's normal.
What I describe as running like a headless chicken started many years before I came to TomTom. I've seen tonnes of internal wiki's that were once created for internal random, ultimately abandoned projects. I even seen two projects attempting the same thing, new one didn't have an idea that somebody, some time ago in that same corporation already tried to build that.
It's standard mode of operation. In corporation you have core business that's kept tight and professional and huge amount of side activity that's just bleeding money trying to discover next big pivot.
They could also return the money to shareholders and let the shareholders invest it into startups and companies that need investment to make money. These are usually much better bets than the old company re-inventing itself.
A company is not an end in itself, it is a temporary assembly of humans to explore a gold vein. Trying to make it eternal serves the CEO, but not the shareholders.
Instead of facebook trying to create the next facebook, it should return money to shareholders and let them buy into whatever is the next big thing.
Perhaps I'm harsh. Reading the annual report [2]. It's a great company! High management board remuneration. Great place to work. A minister on the supervisory board. Measures CO2 and environmental impact and water usage. And still... what does it say when 4400 people generate about 2 years of salary in total market cap? And where the only positive value is free cash flow (non-GAAP).
[1] https://companiesmarketcap.com/tomtom/earnings/
[2] https://corporate.tomtom.com/static-files/8fd1d5d2-0ecb-47b6...
I like the questions at the end of a company since a large market I work in (insurance / life insurance) is dwindling as well. What does that do with companies? How do they communicate? What happens when the inevitable shrinking sets in and your brain drain is faster than the way you shrink? Should you ever actively terminate a company and tranfer IP / assets?
As long as the company provides value to shareholders and customers, why wind it down? Not everything had to be about growth, growth, growth.
TomTom obviously offers no value to shareholders (no dividend policy, history of losses, perhaps except those searching for volatily). It's 49% owned by the directors with a 51% float. It clearly offers some value to customers since it has revenues. However, the revenues have been falling for a decade and most auto manufacturers seem able to procure these materials in-house.
It has value to 4500 employees who retain gainful employment at TomTom! But the financial metric to measure value added for those employees is lacking: TomTom is worth nearly nothing. Society would be better of 'cancelling' TomTom and letting all employees go to companies with higher added value to society. They could be teachers, nurses and researchers at companies that further the technical boundary. Instead, they are working for no value at all except their salaries. It's sad. (: Hyperbole.)
Most auto manufacturers go outside for nav/infotainment units from suppliers like Here, MVI, Telenav, etc.
I don’t see any impenetrable barrier that TomTom couldn’t try to compete in that market (or as a data supplier to that market).
Late 1990s/early 2000s acquisitions just always sound so wild to me! Insanely wasteful, or just even bizarre. Tons of old/traditional corporations trying to merge/buy their way into completely unrelated markets, oe in this case cash rich new megacorps like AOL that had immense potential just squandering insane amounts of capital with almost 0 RoI. Crazy times!
It was tragic that so many amazingly talented engineers ended up resting and vesting at AOL for years - but, at least they all scattered to the winds a few years after that and went to see other companies.
Out of curiosity, why is the life insurance market dwindling??
Most insurers here have closed their books, with only a few products open for sales. A few larger insurers and hedge funds are buying portfolios in order to hopefully gain benefits of scale. There’s basically two ways of making money: better investment returns usually via more risky investments and cost savings. Since many of these products stem from 70s-90s IT modernization and cost saving is a real activity.
Because they are selling raw map data to Google, Bing and Apple (maybe?).
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/29/apple-carplay-massive-succes...
As far as I know, most cars that support CarPlay also support Android auto. I can’t imagine car manufacturers wanting to pay licensing fees to TomTom unnecessarily.
Phone holders are over.
Even as early as 2017, the majority of car buyers already wanted CarPlay in a new vehicle and one-quarter of buyers said it was a "must have". That was five years ago. I'm sure the numbers are much higher now.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/29/apple-carplay-massive-succes....
Over 80% of new cars sold now support CarPlay. There's a reason for that: customers demanded it and walked out of dealerships if they didn't get it.
On the other hand I currently use a phone holder because my car doesn't support Carplay and nobody in their right mind would get a new car just because of this missing feature. That's why the phone holder is such a popular solution. It's a slow process, but I have no doubt that most people will insist on Carplay / Android Auto whenever it's time to get a new car.
While I haven't tried it, Osmand recently added support for Open Street Maps on Android Auto. I'm hopeful the experience is decent, but not willing to pay for it at the moment.
First because it uses the whole screen and heads up display and CarPlay doesn’t. But this is probably something that could be done with better integration.
Second because CarPlay takes over the phone and I want nav to keep running while I use the phone for other things. I know that I shouldn’t, but at stop lights I’ll read texts, HN, etc. with an active nav, I have to switch away from it while I use the phone. With the car running the nav, I can use my phone for whatever I like.
All I use Apple Maps for is to send directions to my car.
It’s kind of nice to just have a dedicated nav in my car.
Mapping isn't the hard part or the expensive part, the hardware is. Smartphones have GPS and when people started getting smartphones, the value of having a separate navigation devices went to zero-ish unless it's built in to your car or maybe some low power thing for wilderness exploration (or having a boat or a plane or that kind of thing)
Not sure if free mapping really existed as an accessible (mobile) product, considering that nearly everyone had to buy the mapdata from dedicated companies (Navteq and TeleAtlas dominated the market, Navteq was later acquired by Nokia, TeleAtlas by TomTom)
In any case, free NAVIGATION didn't exist until Google Maps came along, completely disrupting the whole industry of "casual" Navigation solutions. Hardware wasn't even the issue, companies worked out profitable compact hardware solutions, introduced different tiers from Entry to Premium and in parallel TomTom (and Wayfinder et al) started to offer Navigation as a subscription service directly and as white-label via mobile carriers, with applications for J2ME, Windows PPC, Series60 (Nokia, Samsung,..), Symbian UIQ (Sony, Motorola). They had a robust offering, quality maps and plenty of added datasets like POI, speed-information, radar-warning,... (anyone remembers the celebrity voice packages?)
Then Google opened Navigation as public beta, grabbed a huge chunk of this market and later added offline maps to grab another chunk of it (for navigation in international roaming). The quality was far below any competitor, but it was free and for occasional use totally sufficient...
Map quest was around and popular. Google maps was better for many reasons but it really was an evolutionary product.
Search existed before Google as well. Free maps were very inferior to Google maps and also were a loss leader for other service that’s MapQuest was trying to sell into enterprise and stuff.
Google maps was just another ad stream for Google and so was much easier to link to, embed everywhere. And had an innovative UI.
Before Google cranked up their prices Google maps got embedded everywhere. This was novel and not something that Mapquest and other existing maps promoted.
Multiple times, when in a Taxi in a foreign country, that used the usual solution of smartphone and Google maps, managed to get on time and find a tricky destination by popping up my trusted TomTom.
Presumably the TomTom phone apps do the same. Yes, they have phone apps not just stand alone devices.
to be clear here, for all readers.. you mean TomTom maps are higher quality? in what region? rural, urban or ? thx
But you needed a seperate bluetooth GPS device because my phone didn't include a GPS-receiver.
But TomTom was just on the cusp of a small company turning into a big company.
And the savings and loan crisis was about to cause the economy to collapse.
Then TomTom got into a bidding war with Garmin over Tele Atlas.
So they ended up borrowing a whole lot of money at a really bad time.
Just as the iPhone was hitting the market, and Google and Apple were rolling out free maps and turn-by-turn navigation on smart phones that everybody already had.
I wrote about that earlier in the discussion about Etak:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13747015
DonHopkins on Feb 27, 2017 | parent | context | favorite | on: Who Needs GPS? The Story of Etak's 1985 Car Naviga...
"Etak eventually became a part of TomTom, ensuring that its map data, some of which was first digitized back during the Navigator's development in 1984, would live on to this day."
The story of how TomTom and not Garmin ended up owning the data originally digitized at Etak is interesting. At the time, there were only two digital map companies: Tele Atlas (from which TomTom got their map data) and Navteq (from which Garmin got their map data).
From Wikipedia [1]:
"On July 23, 2007, a €2 billion offer for the company by navigation system maker TomTom was accepted by the Tele Atlas board. This was then trumped by a €2.3 billion offer from United States-based rival Garmin on October 31, 2007 initiating a bidding war for Tele Atlas. TomTom responded by upping their bid to €2.9 billion, an offer which was again approved by the board of Tele Atlas. Garmin had been expected to counterbid once again: with Tele Atlas' main global rival Navteq subject to a takeover bid from Nokia, the company had stated that it did not wish both companies to fall into the hands of rivals. However, after striking a content agreement with Navteq through the year 2015, Garmin withdrew its takeover offer, clearing the way for TomTom. On December 4, 2007, TomTom shareholders approved the takeover. The European Commissioner for Competition cleared the takeover in May 2008, and it closed in June."
TomTom (where I worked at the time) was shocked and dismayed that Garmin outbid them by €300 million on Tele Atlas, because while it made a lot of sense for TomTom to buy their own map data supplier, it would have been prohibitively complex and expensive for Garmin, who used Navteq data, to switch map data sources and retool their entire map data digestion, distribution and error correction pipelines.
TomTom was so determined to buy Tele Atlas and keep it out of Garmin's hands, that they raised their bid by €900 million.
In the meantime, Garmin renegotiated their deal with Navteq, so they didn't have to pay as much for the data, and didn't have to switch map suppliers.
The stunt that Garmin pulled off was, in my opinion, an ingenious head-fake that cost TomTom an enormous amount of money, almost a billion euros, and at the same time saved Garmin a whole lot of money by enabling them to renegotiate a better deal with Navteq, who was faced with losing their major customer if they didn't lower their prices.
TomTom closed their sports division and made most of the staff redundant.
That said, I love my garmin watch - it's and offline device that is useful without selling all your data.
Strong short on TOM2
I know there is map IP as well and maybe that's their only real business opportunity going forward.
This was their first product, http://retro-gps.info/Garmin/Pronav-GPS-100/index.html and their first customer was the US Army. It replaced Army GPS systems which weighed nearly 40 pounds.
"Auto" is notably sitting in last place.
I'm surprised that you can make more money from bike accessories than from aircraft avionics, but I guess everyone needs a bike accessory and nobody really NEEDS a G1000. Plus, no FAA to send paperwork to when you want to make a new bike pedal.
Maybe if you're Garmin, and make very little aircraft avionics. They've never made much on it, since they only make a tiny piece of what aircraft use.
Boeing, Airbus, Lockheed Martin, GE (still in the game?) make enough on aircraft avionics to buy Garmin many times over. Garmin never made it into the space of high end aircraft positioning systems.
[0]: https://www.amazon.ca/TomTom-Runner-GPS-Watch-Black/dp/B00IK...
At least they are honest about it.
I am currently reading the first chapter of 21 lessons for the 21st century and it fills me up with a bit of dread. People having been losing jobs for a long time, but in the future it will get harder to get new ones due to the amount of specialization you need to acquire.
I see high amount of specialization but only after onboarding and not asked of potential candidates.
All we ask are capable software engineers, who we then train to be very specialized in what we do.
Why would you estimate so low? There are a lot of mediocre engineers, myself included, but even they are “capable” depending upon what they are tasked to do.
But from my own observations, people who are genuinely interested usually become capable, anecdotally of course.
In the future, complementary euthanasia will be part of your severance package.
Also up until 2020 they were supplying apple maps with map data.
Apparently doing a streetview kind of thing.
(I've always been surprised that Tesla didn't leverage their fleet of cars covered in cameras to build a maps product.)
This reads weird to me (non-native English speaker). How can you regrettably reach your intended impact? Is that some kind of an idiom?
1. If I could reverse time, I would decide differently getting a different outcome.
2. I am sad that this happens, but it is still the preferable outcome, compared to the alternative.
I think I 'default' to the first meaning. But in this case the second is probably more fitting.
Besides TomTom is a Dutch company so the conditions there are already pretty awesome.
As if to deny any responsibility for how the company was being run.
That's a hell of a lot of institutional knowledge just gone.
It also goes to show that when I automate, I should keep it hidden. That's because I do not receive the gains of automation. Instead, I receive more work or get laid off.
I've worked at two jobs were in the first week I was told my goal was to automate myself so I could progress my career... Yup okay then...
I’m fairly sure this was the goal at least as far back as when ship builders switched from high-skilled artisans to carve each pulley for the sails individually and by hand, to using jigs so that low-skilled carpenters could make a lot that were almost as good for a fraction of the price.
Sounds like an interesting story, do you have a link :D
While it’s job that requires quite a bit of skill (my family member used to do that for other companies), those aren’t people you can redirect to R&D, at least not without heavy retraining.
Real reason behind it, is IMO, preparing for recession and finding nice sounding reason for layoffs.
Anytime you automate something that someone is doing manually, and you're automating it so well, there's a good chance what you build might replace the people doing it.
The saving from those roles could well be going to be reinvested in R&D and product lines.