Monday.com is axing roughly 20% of its workforce, or just over 600 employees, the latest in a brutal year that’s seen U.S. tech companies slash nearly 140,000 jobs since January. The Tel Aviv-based firm framed the move in an SEC filing as a “restructuring plan” to build a “leaner, more focused operating model” around its AI-driven growth strategy. Co-founder Eran Zinman told staff the cuts weren’t about replacing people with AI, but about reorganizing for a vision the company set a year ago. The restructuring will cost between $45 million and $55 million, even as the company projects up to 20% revenue growth for 2026.
But here’s where the corporate narrative starts to fray. A new Financial Times analysis found that companies citing AI as a reason for job cuts have underperformed the Nasdaq by almost 10% in the 30 trading days following their announcements. The market, it seems, isn’t buying the AI-efficiency story as a growth catalyst. The sheer scale of the bloodletting is staggering—Amazon, Oracle, Meta, and Microsoft alone account for nearly 50,000 of those cuts as they funnel hundreds of billions into AI data center buildouts.
Dig into individual cases and the picture gets messier. Microsoft just cut 4,800 roles in its Xbox unit, only three years after dropping $75 billion on Activision Blizzard. CFO Amy Hood said headcount would keep declining despite rising AI investment. Oracle quietly disclosed it had reduced its workforce by 21,000 employees over the past year—a 13% decline—and explicitly warned that AI adoption “may continue to result in reductions.” GitLab laid off 350 workers to fund AI infrastructure, with CEO Bill Staples saying agentic workloads are “pushing competitors to the brink.”
Still, it’s not all doom and gloom. AI-focused firms like Anthropic and OpenAI are hiring rapidly, absorbing talent shed elsewhere. And within some of the very companies making cuts, headcount is shifting rather than disappearing entirely. Meta moved roughly 7,000 employees into new AI-focused roles even as it laid off 8,000 others. IBM says it’s tripling entry-level hiring for AI and hybrid-cloud positions. The question nobody seems to be asking: how long before those new AI hires are the ones being restructured out of existence?
