Monday.com is the latest tech company to blame AI for layoffs — here are 20 others

On Wednesday, Monday.com announced in an SEC filing that it would lay off approximately 20% of its workforce, impacting just over 600 employees. This decision is part of a comprehensive "restructuring plan" designed to align with an "ongoing transformation of its product, marketing, and go-to-market strategy." The company aims to foster "a leaner, more focused operating model" as it intensifies its investment in an "AI-driven growth strategy."

However, co-founder Eran Zinman communicated to employees via a LinkedIn memo that the layoffs "were not made to reduce costs or replace people with AI." Instead, he framed the move as an organizational adaptation to an AI-first vision that the company initially unveiled about a year ago, when it rebranded to emphasize a platform-wide AI initiative. Monday.com, which also maintains two offices in the U.S., anticipates incurring net restructuring charges ranging from $45 million to $55 million. Despite these costs, the company remains optimistic, projecting up to 20% year-over-year revenue growth for 2026.

This development at Monday.com underscores a broader trend sweeping through the U.S. tech industry. According to a recent analysis by the Financial Times, nearly 140,000 jobs have been eliminated since the beginning of this year. Major tech giants such as Amazon, Oracle, Meta, and Microsoft alone account for almost 50,000 of these reductions, even as they collectively funnel hundreds of billions of dollars into constructing advanced AI data centers.

Interestingly, the Financial Times analysis also revealed a skeptical market reaction to these AI-driven layoff announcements. Companies that explicitly cited AI as a factor in their job cuts have, on average, underperformed the Nasdaq composite index by nearly 10% in the 30 trading days following their announcements. This suggests that the market may not fully embrace the narratives presented by these companies regarding the strategic benefits of such workforce reductions.

Despite this seemingly bleak outlook, the landscape is not uniformly negative. The Financial Times noted that specialized AI-focused companies, including Anthropic and OpenAI, are experiencing rapid growth and actively hiring, thereby absorbing some of the talent displaced from other parts of the industry. Furthermore, within some of the very companies implementing cuts, there’s evidence of internal talent reallocation rather than outright disappearance of roles. For example, Meta, earlier this year, transitioned approximately 7,000 employees into new AI-focused positions, even while laying off 8,000 others. Similarly, IBM has announced plans to triple its entry-level hiring for AI and hybrid-cloud roles, concurrent with its recent workforce adjustments.

Below is a detailed overview, presented in reverse chronological order, of major tech companies that have announced significant layoffs this year, explicitly linking them to AI as a contributing factor.

Microsoft – July 9, 2026. Microsoft implemented cuts affecting about 4,800 roles, representing 2.1% of its global workforce. The majority of these reductions occurred within its Xbox gaming unit, signaling a strategic reset for the business just three years after its $75 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard. Additionally, Microsoft offered voluntary separation packages, though the exact number of employees impacted by these buyouts was not disclosed. While the company stated that the role eliminations were "not being replaced by AI," it acknowledged that "AI is changing how work gets done." CFO Amy Hood indicated that total headcount had declined year-over-year in fiscal Q3 and was expected to continue decreasing as the company prioritizes "building high-performing teams that operate with pace and agility" amidst increasing investment in AI. Earlier, in April-May 2026, Microsoft had also offered buyouts structured as voluntary separations, with the CFO reiterating the focus on high-performing teams and declining headcount amid surging AI investment.

Oracle – June 22, 2026. Oracle disclosed a substantial workforce reduction of 21,000 employees over the preceding 12 months, marking a 13% decline. This figure revealed a more extensive scope of cuts than previously known, with AI explicitly cited as a factor. In an annual financial regulatory filing, the company stated, "The adoption and deployment of AI technologies across our operations have resulted, and may continue to result, in reductions to our workforce." These cuts began in March 2026, with Oracle informing employees of thousands of job eliminations via terminal emails. This occurred despite Oracle reporting a quarterly net income of $3.7 billion, a 27% year-over-year increase, and remaining performance obligations soaring 325% to $553 billion. The savings generated were explicitly redirected towards investments in AI data centers.

GitLab – June 3, 2026. GitLab laid off approximately 350 workers, constituting about 14% of its staff. The company stated these cuts were necessary to fund significant AI infrastructure investments and manage surging traffic stemming from AI workflows. CEO Bill Staples commented that "agentic workloads" were "pushing competitors to the brink" and announced that GitLab had initiated a "generational rebuild" of its core infrastructure to support what he termed "100x growth requirements." As part of this overhaul, GitLab is exiting 22 countries, flattening management layers, and partnering with an unspecified AI lab to reconstruct its platform for agent-scale workloads. The company reported first-quarter revenue of $264 million, a 23% year-over-year increase, and anticipates incurring $30 to $35 million in restructuring costs.

Google – ongoing through May 2026. Alphabet’s Google has quietly implemented employee reductions across its Cloud division. These cuts have affected various teams, including its Threat Intelligence Group and cybersecurity staff linked to Mandiant. This occurred even as Google Cloud’s revenue surged by 63% to exceed $20 billion for the first time, and its backlog nearly doubled to over $460 billion. Over the past year, Google has also reduced the number of managers overseeing small teams by more than a third, resulting in 35% fewer managers with fewer direct reports. Unlike many other companies, Google has not announced a single overall layoff number; instead, the cuts have been executed through a rolling performance review process, a voluntary buyout program, and structural reorganizations. External estimates place the total number of engineers impacted in 2026 between 1,500 and over 3,000.

Intuit – May 20, 2026. Intuit unveiled plans to eliminate roughly 3,000 jobs, representing about 17% of its total workforce. This restructuring is primarily aimed at reducing organizational complexity and reallocating resources towards AI initiatives. CEO Sasan Goodarzi reportedly informed staff that the company was streamlining its structure to enhance product delivery.

Meta – May 20-21, 2026. Meta laid off approximately 8,000 employees, about 10% of its workforce. Concurrently, the company moved about 7,000 employees into new AI-focused roles, though reports indicated that these roles were not always well-received by the engineers assigned to them. CEO Mark Zuckerberg addressed staff, stating that the cuts were essential because "success isn’t a given" in the rapidly evolving AI domain.

Cisco – May 14, 2026. Cisco announced it was cutting nearly 4,000 jobs, which constitutes about 5% of its workforce. This decision came despite the company reporting better-than-expected profit and revenue figures. CFO Mark Patterson clarified, "This was really not a savings-driven restructure… this is more [about] realigning… resources around silicon, optics, security and AI."

Cloudflare – May 7-8, 2026. Cloudflare reduced its workforce by about 20%, impacting 1,100 people. This occurred even as the company reported quarterly revenue of $639.8 million, a 34% year-over-year increase, marking its highest single quarter in history. CEO Matthew Prince wrote that "the vast majority of those we laid off last week were measurers" – a term he used to describe roles in middle management, finance, legal, internal auditing, and revenue recognition, implying that AI automation played a role in making these positions obsolete.

General Motors – May 12, 2026. GM eliminated 500 to 600 jobs, predominantly in IT roles located in Austin, Texas, and Warren, Michigan. The company cited a reevaluation of its workforce needs amidst uncertain market conditions. A source familiar with the cuts informed CNBC that AI was a factor in the decision, though not the sole reason. GM’s official statement noted that it was "transforming its Information Technology organization to better position the company for the future." Despite these reductions, the company still maintained roughly 80 open IT positions, including roles focused on AI, motorsports, and autonomous vehicles.

Coinbase – May 5, 2026. The cryptocurrency exchange announced a reduction of approximately 700 employees, representing 14% of its staff. This was part of a broader restructuring aimed at addressing market volatility and enhancing AI efficiency. The company flattened its organizational structure to five layers below the CEO and COO and indicated it would experiment with "one-person teams" combining engineering, design, and product responsibilities. CEO Brian Armstrong emphasized that AI had dramatically accelerated the pace of work, noting that "engineers use AI to ship in days what used to take a team weeks," and stressed the company’s need to "leverage AI across every facet of our jobs."

PayPal – May 5, 2026. PayPal unveiled plans to cut around 20% of its workforce—exceeding 4,500 jobs—over the next two to three years. This forms a core component of a turnaround strategy focused on aggressive AI adoption and organizational simplification. CEO Enrique Lores informed investors that the company would "aggressively adopt AI" in its development processes. To spearhead this transformation, PayPal formed a new "AI transformation and simplification" team reporting directly to him, tasked with redesigning the company’s processes "function by function." Lores explained the cuts as a means of removing organizational layers, predicting that AI’s influence would extend far beyond coding into critical areas like customer service, support operations, and risk management.

Snap – April 16, 2026. Snap reduced its global workforce by approximately 16%, impacting about 1,000 full-time employees, and closed more than 300 open roles. CEO Evan Spiegel cited advancements in AI as a primary driver. In a memo filed with the SEC, Spiegel stated, "Rapid advancements in artificial intelligence enable our teams to reduce repetitive work, increase velocity, and better support our community, partners, and advertisers." The company noted that small teams were already utilizing AI tools to drive progress across Snapchat+, ad platform performance, and infrastructure efficiency.

IBM – rolling through 2026. Estimates suggest that between Q4 2025 cuts and April 2026 reductions within Red Hat engineering, 3,000 to 9,000 U.S. positions were eliminated, bringing IBM’s cumulative total since September 2024 to over 15,000. Bloomberg reported that IBM plans to triple its U.S. entry-level hiring for AI and hybrid-cloud roles, even as roughly 200 HR positions were reportedly replaced by AI agents. An IBM spokesperson characterized the Q4 2025 round as a "routine rebalancing" affecting "a low single-digit percentage" of its global workforce.

Atlassian – March 11, 2026. Atlassian cut about 1,600 jobs, representing 10% of its workforce, to "rebalance" its resources towards AI and enterprise sales. Despite the news, shares of the company rose nearly 2%. CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes acknowledged, "Our approach is not ‘AI replaces people.’ But it would be disingenuous to pretend AI doesn’t change the mix of skills we need or the number of roles required in certain areas. It does."

Dell – January 30, 2026 (disclosed in March 2026). Dell’s total workforce decreased by approximately 10% in fiscal 2026, equating to roughly 11,000 jobs, reducing its employee count from 108,000 to 97,000. The company spent $569 million on severance costs related to these reductions. The cuts occurred as Dell projected that its AI-optimized server revenue could double in fiscal 2027.

Block – February 26-27, 2026. Jack Dorsey’s Block implemented significant cuts, eliminating 4,000 jobs, which represented nearly half its workforce, bringing the total down from over 10,000 to under 6,000. Dorsey commented on X, stating, "We’re already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company." He further predicted, "Within the next year, I believe the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion and make similar structural changes."

Salesforce – February 10, 2026. Salesforce laid off fewer than 1,000 employees across various departments including marketing, product management, data analytics, and its Agentforce AI unit. The company informed Fortune that "because of the benefits and efficiencies of Agentforce, we’ve seen the number of support cases we handle decline and we no longer need to actively backfill support engineer roles." This followed an earlier reduction of approximately 4,000 customer-support roles, shrinking that team from roughly 9,000 to 5,000, with CEO Marc Benioff indicating that the company required "less heads" due to AI agents handling much of the work.

Amazon – January 28, 2026. Amazon cut 16,000 corporate jobs, following an earlier reduction of 14,000 in October 2025. These combined cuts represented about 9% of its corporate workforce over a three-month period. The company stated the move was part of an effort to "strengthen our organization by reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy." CEO Andy Jassy had previously stated in June 2025 that, "As we roll out more generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done. We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today… in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company."