Monday.com AI layoffs landed this week when the Tel Aviv-based work management platform disclosed it would cut just over 600 employees, roughly 20% of its global workforce, in an SEC filing. Co-founder and co-CEO Eran Zinman was quick to frame it as anything but a cost exercise.
‘The organisation we built for our previous chapter is not the organisation that fits the new AI era,’ Zinman wrote in a memo to employees, adding that the move ‘was not made to reduce costs or replace people with AI.’ The company’s stated goal is to reorganise around what it and co-CEO Roy Mann call an ‘AI Work Platform’ vision, in which AI agents and humans operate inside the same system rather than humans simply managing work through software.
You’ve heard the script. So has the market.
Monday.com AI Layoffs: What the Numbers Actually Say
The restructuring will cost Monday.com between $45 million and $55 million in net charges. That net figure reflects a specific structure: according to the Form 6-K filing summarised by StockTitan, the gross costs break into $30–$35 million for severance, employee benefits and related expenses, plus another $30–$35 million from office space impairments, partially offset by approximately $15 million of non-cash share-based compensation credits. Most of those charges are expected to be recognised, and the plan substantially completed, in the second half of 2026.
Despite the upheaval, Monday.com still projects up to 20% year-over-year revenue growth for 2026. And in a detail that doesn’t usually accompany a ‘this is purely strategic’ restructuring, the company simultaneously raised its 2026 full-year operating margin outlook to 15% from 13%. Margins going up by two percentage points on the day you announce six hundred redundancies is, whatever the company says, a cost story as well as a strategy story.
The balance sheet adds useful context. Monday.com’s annual report filed with the SEC on EDGAR shows an accumulated deficit of $433.3 million as of 31 December 2025, reduced from $552.0 million as of 31 December 2024. Deferred revenue rose to $411.6 million from $342.6 million over the same period. The deficit is shrinking and forward bookings are growing; this is a company whose fundamentals are improving, which makes the scale of the restructuring harder to read as distress and easier to read as genuine repositioning.
The cuts hit a ‘broad base’ of the company’s global offices, which span Europe, Australia, South America, and Asia, not just Monday.com’s two US locations in New York and Denver.
The Wider Picture: 140,000 Jobs and a Sceptical Market
Monday.com is the latest addition to a list that has grown uncomfortably long. US tech companies have slashed nearly 140,000 jobs since the start of this year, according to Financial Times analysis, with Amazon, Oracle, Meta, and Microsoft alone accounting for almost 50,000 of those cuts as they channel hundreds of billions into AI data centre buildouts.
Oracle’s restructuring tells a similar story at a larger scale. Its fiscal 2026 Form 10-K, filed with the SEC, records total restructuring charges of $1.779 billion for the year ended 31 May 2026, up from $299 million in fiscal 2025 and $404 million in fiscal 2024. The company reduced its workforce by 21,000 employees over the past 12 months, a 13% decline, even as its remaining performance obligations hit $553 billion.
The FT’s analysis carries one finding that should unsettle every communications team drafting an AI-first narrative: companies citing AI as a factor in job cuts have underperformed the Nasdaq by almost 10% in the 30 trading days following their announcements. The market, apparently, is not buying the framing.
That said, the picture isn’t purely bleak. Atlassian CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes put it about as honestly as anyone has: ‘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.’ Meanwhile, companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are hiring rapidly, absorbing some of the talent shed elsewhere.
For Monday.com, the real test arrives in the second half of 2026 when the restructuring is expected to complete. If that operating margin holds at 15% and the revenue growth projection proves accurate, the AI Work Platform story will look credible in hindsight. If not, the company will have spent $45–$55 million discovering that reorganising around a buzzword is harder than announcing it.
