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

Monday.com this week joined the lengthening queue of tech firms that cite artificial intelligence as a reason to shrink headcount. The Tel Aviv-based work-management platform told the SEC it will shed 20% of its staff — roughly 600 people — as part of a "restructuring plan" tied to an "AI-driven growth strategy." Co-founder Eran Zinman rushed to LinkedIn to insist the move "was not made to reduce costs or replace people with AI." He framed it as organizational adaptation to an AI-first vision declared a year ago. The market noticed anyway. Monday.com still projects 20% revenue growth for 2026, but the $45‑55 million restructuring charge tells its own story.

The Financial Times has been tallying the damage. Since January, U.S. tech companies have axed nearly 140,000 jobs. Amazon, Oracle, Meta, and Microsoft alone account for almost 50,000 of those cuts — even as they pour hundreds of billions into AI data centers. The FT's more striking finding: firms that explicitly blamed AI for layoffs underperformed the Nasdaq by almost 10% in the 30 trading days after their announcements. Investors, it seems, don't buy the line that AI forces these cuts. They see a convenient macro excuse for micro problems: bloated cost structures, overhiring during the pandemic boom, and the pressure to show operating leverage.

Monday.com is hardly alone. The FT's running list — reverse chronological, AI-cited — includes Microsoft (July, 4,800 roles, mostly Xbox, with a CFO admitting headcount will keep declining), Meta (8,000 cuts alongside 7,000 internal transfers to AI teams), Amazon (twice this year, citing efficiency gains from automation), Oracle (redundancies in cloud sales as AI tools absorb routine tasks), Salesforce (cutting engineers while buying AI startups), Google (advertising and hardware trims, "AI-first" reorganization), IBM (layoffs in legacy units, tripling entry‑level AI hiring), Cisco (4,000 roles, pivot to AI networking), Intel (15,000 cuts, foundry focus), Dell (6,000, AI‑optimized supply chain), PayPal (2,500, AI fraud detection), eBay (1,000, AI listing tools), Snap (500, AI content moderation), Zoom (150, AI meeting summaries), DocuSign (300, AI contract analysis), Duolingo (contractor cuts, AI translation), Klarna (700, AI customer service), Vimeo (11%, AI video indexing), and Dropbox (500, AI file organization). That's twenty companies beyond Monday.com, each wrapping workforce reduction in the language of transformation.

The pattern is too consistent for coincidence. When a company says "AI is changing how work gets done" while firing the people who do the work, it's not describing a technological inevitability. It's exercising a strategic choice. Microsoft's Xbox cuts came three years after a $75 billion Activision acquisition — a digest‑the‑deal move dressed in AI vocabulary. Meta's simultaneous layoffs and internal transfers reveal the real dynamic: displacement, not replacement. IBM's tripling of junior AI hires while shedding senior legacy staff signals a wage‑arbitrage play, not a capability gap.

Meanwhile, the pure‑play AI labs are hiring aggressively. Anthropic and OpenAI are absorbing engineers, researchers, and product talent at a clip that contradicts the industry‑wide contraction narrative. The labor market isn't shrinking; it's sorting. Workers with relevant AI fluency move up and in. Those without it move out — or get moved.

This sorting has consequences. The 10% underperformance of AI‑blaming stocks suggests capital sees through the rhetoric. Restructuring charges hit earnings now; AI revenue promises stay distant. The gap invites skepticism. Monday.com's 20% revenue growth target for 2026 already bakes in AI tailwinds. If those tailwinds stall, the restructuring looks like collateral damage, not strategy.

The honest headline would read: "Tech companies use AI to justify cuts they'd make anyway." But honest headlines don't appear in SEC filings or LinkedIn memos. They appear in the price action. The market has spoken. Now the industry must decide whether to keep hiding behind the algorithm or start explaining the actual math.