600 Jobs Gone at Monday.com as Wave of AI-Justified Cuts Sweeps 140,000 From Tech Sector

Tel Aviv-based Monday.com, best known for its vibrant, drag-and-drop project management platform, filed notice with the SEC this week that it plans to cut approximately 600 employees — a reduction of around 20% of its total workforce. The company framed the decision as part of a broader restructuring tied to what it described as an 'AI-driven growth strategy,' signaling a pivot toward a leaner operational structure built around artificial intelligence. The restructuring is expected to generate between $45 million and $55 million in net charges, though Monday.com still projects year-over-year revenue growth of up to 20% for 2026.

Co-founder Eran Zinman moved quickly to address concerns from employees, writing in a LinkedIn memo that the layoffs were 'not made to reduce costs or replace people with AI.' Instead, he positioned the cuts as an organizational realignment consistent with an AI-first vision the company announced roughly a year ago when it undertook a platform-wide rebrand. Critics, however, note the distinction between cost reduction and AI transformation may be more rhetorical than real when hundreds of jobs disappear regardless of the stated rationale.

Monday.com's announcement lands in the middle of a much larger industry reckoning. According to new analysis by the Financial Times, U.S. tech companies have collectively cut nearly 140,000 jobs since January, with Amazon, Oracle, Meta, and Microsoft alone responsible for close to 50,000 of those eliminations. These same companies are simultaneously pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into AI data center infrastructure, making the layoffs appear less like belt-tightening and more like a deliberate reallocation of human capital toward machine-driven systems.

The companies doing the cutting span industries and business models. Oracle disclosed a 21,000-person reduction — 13% of its workforce — over the past year, directly attributing part of the decline to AI adoption. GitLab shed 14% of staff to fund AI infrastructure investment while simultaneously exiting 22 countries. Cloudflare cut 20% of headcount despite reporting its highest quarterly revenue ever, with CEO Matthew Prince describing the dismissed workers largely as middle managers and internal auditors. Meta laid off 8,000 employees while reassigning 7,000 others to AI-focused roles. Cisco, Intuit, Coinbase, and PayPal each cited AI transformation as a central driver behind their own significant workforce reductions.

Not every data point points in the same direction. The FT's analysis found that companies explicitly naming AI as a layoff factor have underperformed the Nasdaq by nearly 10% in the 30 trading days following their announcements — a signal that markets may not be fully buying the AI transformation narrative. At the same time, AI-native firms like Anthropic and OpenAI are actively hiring, and companies like IBM report tripling entry-level recruitment for AI and hybrid-cloud roles. The workforce disruption, in other words, is real and substantial, but the landing zone for displaced workers remains deeply uneven.