Monday.com lays off 20% of its workforce (around 630 employees) to refocus the company on AI

Monday.com, the Israeli productivity and work management software firm, has announced the layoff of hundreds of employees as part of a restructuring aimed at concentrating its investments in artificial intelligence. According to the company, the cut affects 20% of its workforce, around 630 people, with the stated goal of achieving a 'more agile and focused operating model' as it doubles down on what it calls the AI Work Platform.

This move does not come out of nowhere: earlier this year Monday.com had already pivoted strongly toward AI, completely redesigning its product on the premise that its enterprise customers increasingly want AI agents to work side by side with human employees. The AI Work Platform the company is promoting includes, as described, a no-code app builder, a customizable AI agent, a workflow automation tool and a chatbot capable of performing tasks such as generating reports or updating dashboards.

In financial terms, Monday.com estimates that this restructuring will cost it between $45 million and $55 million in associated charges. It is a figure that gives an idea of the scale of the operation, although the article does not detail whether those charges correspond only to severance payments or whether they also include other reorganization costs.

Monday.com's case fits within a much broader trend in the technology industry. Numerous large companies in the sector have laid off hundreds of thousands of workers as they redirect their resources toward AI. In fact, May of this year recorded the highest monthly peak of tech layoffs in years, and according to data from Layoffs.fyi, 78% of the companies that have cut staff so far in 2026 have explicitly cited the need to refocus on AI as the reason. In total, more than 122,000 tech jobs have already been eliminated so far this year.

What this episode illustrates, beyond the specific case of Monday.com, is a pattern repeating across the sector: AI is presented not only as a tool that adds capabilities to products, but as an explicit reason to reduce human headcount and redirect capital toward the development of agents and automation. The corporate narrative usually frames these cuts as a 'strategic reorientation' toward AI, but the backdrop —hundreds of thousands of jobs lost across the sector during 2026— suggests a fundamental reconfiguration in how software companies understand the relationship between human workforce and automated agents. It remains to be seen whether this bet by Monday.com on an AI that 'works alongside employees' translates into products that effectively replace functions previously performed by people, or whether the cut responds instead to a need for cost containment dressed up in the language of AI-driven transformation.