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Transcript

Monday.com Cuts 620 Jobs for an 'AI-Driven Growth Strategy,' Then Says the Layoffs Weren't About Replacing People With AI · Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts

• 0:00
  [Host] This is Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts, the show where the layoff filing and the CEO memo contradict each other and both turn out to be true. On July twenty-second, monday dot com told U.S. securities regulators it was cutting about one in five employees to align with its AI-driven growth strategy.
• 0:19
  [Guest] Six hundred twenty people at the Tel Aviv software company. In the same filing, it reaffirmed guidance for the year: revenue still growing about twenty percent. Cutting one in five people while promising investors that same rate of growth.
• 0:33
  [Host] So an AI took six hundred twenty jobs.
• 0:36
  [Guest] That's the part the co-CEO went out of his way to deny. Eran Zinman published a memo the same day saying the decision was not made to reduce costs or replace people with AI.
• 0:49
  [Host] He wrote that while the filing said AI-driven growth strategy. So which is the company's actual position?
• 0:56
  [Guest] Both, and they don't contradict. Nobody automated those roles. The company decided the organization it built to sell project-management software is the wrong shape for selling AI agents that do the work. It even told regulators it will keep hiring in what it called key strategic areas.
• 1:13
  [Host] Who actually got the email?
• 1:15
  [Guest] The filing points at product, marketing, and go-to-market. In plain English, the people who sell the software, onboard the customers, and run the campaigns.
• 1:24
  [Host] Did investors reward it?
• 1:26
  [Guest] The stock ticked up, then gave it back. It's down roughly seventy-five percent from its high, caught in a selloff across enterprise software, on a fear that if any company can spin up its own tools with an AI coding assistant, it stops paying for a subscription.
• 1:43
  [Host] So the threat isn't AI doing the employees' jobs. It's AI doing the customers' jobs.
• 1:49
  [Guest] Demand side, not supply side. Those workers are collateral in a bet about what customers will still be buying by the end of the decade.
• 1:58
  [Host] One company reading the tea leaves, or the whole sector?
• 2:02
  [Guest] Challenger, Gray and Christmas counted a hundred thirty-nine thousand announced tech job cuts in the first half of this year. Andy Challenger's line: AI is the dominant force, companies are restructuring around it.
• 2:14
  [Host] That's half his sentence. The rest of it says automating roles. And AI has been the single most-cited reason companies gave for cutting jobs, month after month this year. At some point, around is just a polite word for because.
• 2:30
  [Guest] Fair. But the capability isn't there yet. Anthropic's labor study in March found no systematic rise in unemployment among the most AI-exposed workers since ChatGPT shipped.
• 2:39
  [Host] Then nobody is actually losing anything.
• 2:42
  [Guest] One group is. For twenty-two to twenty-five-year-olds trying to enter those exposed occupations, the rate of actually landing a job is running about fourteen percent below its pre-ChatGPT level. The first signal isn't people being fired. It's the door not opening.
• 2:57
  [Host] So it shows up as a hiring freeze years before it shows up as a layoff.
• 3:03
  [Guest] California now watches for it by name. Its AI-Unemployment Tracker, built with the Policy Lab at U.C.L.A., found no statewide surge, but claims are already rising among college-educated workers in exposed jobs in the Bay Area.
• 3:17
  [Host] If you sell software for a living, what do you do with that?
• 3:21
  [Guest] Read what your employer files, not what it says on stage. The paycheck stops on the strategy, not on the software.
• 3:29
  [Host] Patrick Deglon calls this the Labor Cliff in his book Unscarcity. Though nobody here crossed what he calls the Substitution Threshold. No machine is cheaper than those workers yet. This company stepped off early, on a forecast.
• 3:43
  [Guest] For more on what happens when the org chart moves faster than the technology, head to unscarcity dot ai. The book is on Amazon, the audiobook is on Spotify. This has been Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts.