Monday.com said in an SEC filing on Wednesday that it will lay off about 20% of its workforce, or just over 600 employees, as part of a restructuring tied to its product, marketing and go-to-market strategy. The company said the cuts support a leaner operating model and its AI-driven growth strategy. That’s the hard edge of the new corporate script: fewer workers, more automation, and a fresh coat of AI branding over the same old hierarchy.
Co-founder Eran Zinman told employees in a LinkedIn memo that the move was not made to reduce costs or replace people with AI. He said it was about adapting the organization to a new AI-first vision the company laid out roughly a year ago when it rebranded around a platform-wide AI push. Monday.com has two offices in the U.S. and expects $45 million to $55 million in net restructuring charges, while still projecting up to 20% year-over-year revenue growth for 2026.
Who Pays for the “Transformation”
The people at the bottom are the ones who get the bill. A new Financial Times analysis cited by TechCrunch says U.S. tech companies have slashed nearly 140,000 jobs since the start of this year. Amazon, Oracle, Meta and Microsoft alone account for almost 50,000 of those cuts as they funnel hundreds of billions of dollars into AI data center buildouts. The companies talk about efficiency. Workers get the pink slips.
The FT analysis also found that companies citing AI as a factor in job cuts have underperformed the Nasdaq by almost 10% in the 30 trading days after their announcements. AI-focused companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI are hiring rapidly and absorbing some of the talent shed elsewhere in the industry. In other words, the labor doesn’t vanish. It gets shuffled around by capital, while the people who lose their jobs are told this is progress.
What the Companies Say
Microsoft cut about 4,800 roles, or 2.1% of its global workforce, on July 9, 2026, most of them in its Xbox gaming unit, resetting the business only three years after acquiring Activision Blizzard for $75 billion, per the FT. The company also offered buyouts structured as voluntary separations, without disclosing how many employees they would affect. Microsoft said the role eliminations were not being replaced by AI but acknowledged that AI is changing how work gets done. CFO Amy Hood said total headcount declined year-over-year in fiscal Q3 and was expected to keep declining as the company focuses on building high-performing teams that operate with pace and agility amid rising AI investment.
Oracle disclosed on June 22, 2026, that it had reduced its workforce by 21,000 employees over the past 12 months, a decline of 13%, meaning more cuts than had previously been known, including because of AI. In an annual financial regulatory filing, the company said: “The adoption and deployment of AI technologies across our operations have resulted, and may continue to result, in reductions to our workforce.” Oracle also began telling employees on March 5-31, 2026, that it would be cutting thousands of jobs via terminal emails. Those cuts came even as Oracle posted $3.7 billion in quarterly net income, up 27% year-over-year, with remaining performance obligations up 325% to $553 billion, and the savings were redirected toward AI data centers.
GitLab laid off roughly 350 workers, about 14% of its staff, on June 3, 2026, to fund AI infrastructure investment and handle surging traffic from AI workflows. CEO Bill Staples said agentic workloads are pushing competitors to the brink and that the company had begun a generational rebuild of its core infrastructure to support what he called 100x growth requirements. GitLab is exiting 22 countries, flattening management layers and partnering with an unspecified AI lab to rebuild its platform for agent-scale workloads. The company reported first-quarter revenue of $264 million, up 23% year-over-year, and expects to incur $30 million to $35 million in restructuring costs.
Google has quietly cut employees across its Cloud division, including its Threat Intelligence Group and Mandiant-linked cybersecurity staff, even as Cloud revenue grew 63% to exceed $20 billion for the first time and its backlog nearly doubled to over $460 billion. Over the past year, Google has cut more than a third of the managers overseeing small teams, leaving 35% fewer managers with fewer direct reports. Unlike most companies on the list, Google has never announced a single overall number. The cuts have come through a rolling performance review process, a voluntary buyout program and structural reorganizations, with outside estimates putting the 2026 total at between 1,500 and 3,000-plus engineers.
The New Normal They’re Selling
Intuit announced on May 20, 2026, that it planned to eliminate roughly 3,000 jobs, about 17% of its total workforce, in a restructuring centered on reducing complexity and reallocating resources toward AI. CEO Sasan Goodarzi reportedly told staff the company is reducing complexity and simplifying the structure so it can deliver better products.
Meta laid off about 8,000 employees on May 20-21, 2026, roughly 10% of its workforce, while moving about 7,000 employees into new AI-focused roles. CEO Mark Zuckerberg told staff the cuts were necessary because success isn’t a given in AI.
Cisco announced on May 14, 2026, that it was cutting nearly 4,000 jobs, about 5% of its workforce, despite reporting better-than-expected profit and revenue. CFO Mark Patterson said: “This was really not a savings-driven restructure… this is more [about] realigning … resources around silicon, optics, security and AI.”
Cloudflare cut about 20% of its workforce, or 1,100 people, on May 7-8, 2026, while reporting quarterly revenue of $639.8 million, up 34% year-over-year and the highest single quarter in company history. CEO Matthew Prince wrote that “the vast majority of those we laid off last week were measurers” — middle management, finance, legal, internal auditing and revenue recognition.
General Motors eliminated 500 to 600 jobs on May 12, 2026, largely in IT roles in Austin, Texas, and Warren, Michigan, saying it was reevaluating its workforce needs amid uncertain market conditions. A person familiar with the cuts told CNBC that AI played a role in the decision but that it wasn’t the only reason. GM said it was transforming its Information Technology organization to better position the company for the future. Despite the cuts, the company still had roughly 80 open IT positions, including roles in AI, motorsports and autonomous vehicles.
Coinbase said on May 5, 2026, that it was cutting about 700 employees, or 14% of its staff, as part of a restructuring aimed at addressing market volatility and increasing AI efficiency. The company flattened its organizational structure to five layers below the CEO and COO and said it would experiment with one-person teams combining engineering, design and product roles. CEO Brian Armstrong wrote that AI had changed the pace of work dramatically: “engineers use [AI to ship in days what used to take a team weeks]” and that the company needed to “leverage AI across every facet of our jobs.”
PayPal announced on May 5, 2026, that it planned to cut around 20% of its workforce over the next two to three years, north of 4,500 jobs, as part of a turnaround strategy centered on AI adoption and organizational simplification. CEO Enrique Lores told investors the company would aggressively adopt AI in its development processes and formed a new AI transformation and simplification team reporting directly to him, tasked with redesigning the company’s processes function by function. Lores said the cuts were about removing organizational layers and said AI would extend well beyond coding into customer service, support operations and risk management.
Snap cut roughly 16% of its global workforce, about 1,000 full-time employees, and closed more than 300 open roles on April 16, 2026, with CEO Evan Spiegel citing AI advancements as a key driver. In a memo filed with the SEC, Spiegel wrote: “Rapid advancements in artificial intelligence enable our teams to reduce repetitive work, increase velocity, and better support our community, partners, and advertisers.” The company said it had already seen small squads using AI tools to drive progress across Snapchat+, ad platform performance and infrastructure efficiency.
IBM’s cuts have rolled through 2026, with estimates ranging from 3,000 to 9,000 U.S. positions eliminated between Q4 2025 cuts and April 2026 Red Hat engineering reductions, bringing IBM’s cumulative total since September 2024 above 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 replaced by AI agents. An IBM spokesperson described the Q4 2025 round as a routine rebalancing affecting “a low single-digit percentage” of its global workforce.
Atlassian cut about 1,600 jobs, or 10% of its workforce, on March 11, 2026, to rebalance toward AI and enterprise sales, even as shares rose nearly 2% on the news. CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes said: “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’s total workforce fell about 10% in fiscal 2026, roughly 11,000 jobs, to about 97,000 employees from 108,000 a year earlier, with $569 million spent on severance. The cuts came as Dell projected its AI-optimized server revenue could double in fiscal 2027.
Block cut 4,000 jobs on February 26-27, 2026, nearly half its workforce, down to under 6,000 from over 10,000. Jack Dorsey wrote on X: “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 added: “I think most companies are late. Within the next year, I believe the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion and [make similar structural changes].”
Salesforce laid off fewer than 1,000 employees on February 10, 2026, across marketing, product management, data analytics and its Agentforce AI unit. The company told Fortune: “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.” That followed an earlier cut of about 4,000 customer-support roles, shrinking that team from roughly 9,000 to 5,000, with CEO Marc Benioff saying the company needed “less heads” because AI agents handle the work.
Amazon cut 16,000 corporate jobs on January 28, 2026, following 14,000 cuts in October 2025, about 9% of its corporate workforce in three months. The company said the move was part of strengthening its organization by reducing layers, increasing ownership and removing bureaucracy. CEO Andy Jassy said in June 2025: “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.”