Dell continues to quietly shrink its workforce

• Dell's staff head count has fallen by around 10% for the third year in a row.
• The PC giant's workforce total dropped by 11,000 in the year to January 31, 2026.
• Instead of mass layoff announcements, Dell is using a quieter strategy.

Mass layoffs are all the rage in the tech industry.

This year alone, Amazon has cut 16,000 jobs, Jack Dorsey's fintech firm Block has slashed half its workforce, and the software company Atlassian has laid off 4,000 employees — about 10% of staff. Next up, Meta is reportedly preparing cuts of 20% or more.

The PC giant Dell is taking a different approach, quietly but systematically shrinking its head count.

In its latest 10-K filing, published on Monday, Dell said that it had roughly 97,000 employees as of January 31, 2026. The number marks an 11,000 reduction in the company's workforce in the last year.

The number includes both attrition and layoffs, but a clear pattern is emerging — it's the third year in a row that Dell's workforce has shrunk by 10%.

The company now has 36,000 fewer employees than in February 2023 — a 27% decline over three years.

The company said in the filing that throughout its 2026 fiscal year, it had reduced costs through measures including "employee reorganizations, limitation of external hiring, and other actions to align our investments with our announced strategic and customer priorities."

"We are always assessing our business to remain competitive and ensure we are set up to deliver the best innovation, value, and service to our customers and partners," Dell said in a statement to Business Insider.

Job cuts across tech are being linked to AI

This year's headline-grabbing tech layoff announcements share a common thread: companies are tying job cuts to AI transformations.

Memos from both Block's and Atlassian's CEOs highlighted profound shifts in how they see technology reshaping work and, therefore, how many workers they'll need in the years to come.

Dell may be less overt about announcing employee cuts, but, like others in the industry, it is undergoing a major modernization push as it prepares for an AI-driven future.

In its 10k filing, Dell said it had been committed to "cost management in coordination with our ongoing business modernization initiatives."

In its latest annual results, revenue in Dell's Infrastructure Solutions Group (ISG), which sells servers and storage infrastructure, rose 40% in its 2026 fiscal year, and the company said it expected AI-optimized server revenue to double in 2027.

Internally, Dell is preparing to roll out standardized processes across its operations and launch a single enterprise platform, an initiative it has called One Dell Way. In a January memo, Dell told staff the systems overhaul would be the "biggest transformation in company history," Business Insider exclusively reported.

In line with other tech industry trends, Dell has also been tightening workplace policies for its remaining 97,000 employees, first with a 5-day RTO mandate for workers living near offices and, most recently, in February, introducing a tougher compensation system for sales staff.

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