AI Layoffs
Atlassian said on Wednesday that it’s eliminating 10% of its workforce, or about 1,600 jobs, as the company restructures following a plunge in its stock price driven by developments in artificial intelligence.
“We are doing this to self-fund further investment in AI and enterprise sales, while strengthening our financial profile,” CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes said in a blog post.
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Other bosses have played up AI while saying they were lowering headcount in recent months. In February, Block’s Jack Dorsey announced that the payment company would lay off 4,000 employees as it seeks to put “intelligence” at the core of its operations. Amazon’s top human-resources executive, Beth Galetti, said in an October blog post disclosing a 14,000-person reduction in force that “this generation of AI is the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the internet.”
Amazon is laying off 16,000 employees, the company’s second round of large-scale job reductions in three months as it fights to improve its standing in the battle for AI supremacy.
Axel Kannenberg (Hacker News):
Cannon-Brookes emphasized in his blog post that Atlassian does not follow the philosophy of replacing people with AI. At the same time, he also stated, “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.”
The move comes as investors increasingly scrutinize software firms amid fears that advances in AI could disrupt traditional software business models, though some analysts say the sector-wide selloff may be an overreaction.
Top executives at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in January had said that while jobs would disappear, new ones would spring up, with two telling Reuters that AI would be used as an excuse by companies that were already planning layoffs.
AI is a convenient scapegoat to distract from the actual failures in both businesses.
Resume.org (via John Gruber):
Companies cite AI (44%), reorganization/restructuring (42%), and budget constraints (39%) as the top drivers of layoffs
59% admit they emphasize AI when explaining hiring freezes or layoffs because it plays better with stakeholders than citing financial constraints
Zaheer Kachwala and Joel Jose:
Adobe’s battered shares fell another 6% on Friday as news that the Photoshop maker’s long-time CEO would step down cast fresh doubts over its strategy to battle mounting AI competition.
Shantanu Narayen is credited with crafting the modern Adobe by turning its creative tools into a subscription service with more reliable revenue. But an influx of artificial intelligence rivals that can create images at low cost and with a simple text prompt has in recent years raised doubts about its position.
Adobe is facing growing pressure from AI disruption, slowing enterprise budgets, and investor concerns about the future of creative software. In this episode of The Grind Hotline, we break down why layoffs could be coming next — and what the signals inside the tech industry are telling us.
seeing lot of people especially in noida getting put on pips lately particularly from dx team. no severance being offered just performance improvement plans that everyone knows are precursor to firing.
Katie Paul, Jeff Horwitz, and Deepa Seetharaman:
Meta is planning sweeping layoffs that could affect 20% or more of the company, three sources familiar with the matter told Reuters, as Meta seeks to offset costly artificial intelligence infrastructure bets and prepare for greater efficiency brought about by AI-assisted workers.
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Over the last year, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been pushing Meta to compete more forcefully in generative AI. The company has offered huge pay packages, some worth hundreds of millions of dollars over four years, to court top AI researchers to a new superintelligence team.
The company has said it plans to invest $600 billion to build data centers by 2028.
Andrej Karpathy (Hacker News):
This is a research tool that visualizes 342 occupations from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook, covering 143M jobs across the US economy. Each rectangle’s area is proportional to total employment. Color shows the selected metric — toggle between BLS projected growth outlook, median pay, education requirements, and AI exposure.
Previously:
- Meta Acquires Moltbook
- Greg Knauss Is Losing Himself
- AI Deployment and Job Displacement
- Microsoft Layoffs
