Monday.com is the latest tech company to blame AI for layoffs — here are 20 others
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- Monday.com said it will lay off about 20% of its workforce (~600 employees), expecting $45 million to $55 million in net restructuring charges while still projecting up to 20% year-over-year revenue growth for 2026.
- Co-founder Eran Zinman told staff the cuts "were not made to reduce costs or replace people with AI," instead framing them as alignment with the AI-first vision set during the company's rebrand roughly a year earlier.
- A Financial Times analysis found U.S. tech firms have eliminated nearly 140,000 jobs so far in 2026, with Amazon, Oracle, Meta, and Microsoft alone accounting for roughly 50,000 of those cuts.
- Companies publicly tying layoffs to AI have underperformed the Nasdaq by nearly 10% in the 30 trading days after their announcements, per the FT — a signal that investors aren't buying the productivity story.
- AI-native firms like Anthropic and OpenAI are hiring aggressively and absorbing displaced talent, while legacy tech companies are reshuffling rather than just shrinking: Meta moved ~7,000 employees into AI roles while laying off 8,000 others.
- Among the year's largest cuts: Oracle disclosed 21,000 jobs eliminated over 12 months (a 13% workforce decline), Microsoft cut ~4,800 roles on July 9, Cisco is shedding ~4,000, Cloudflare eliminated 1,100 (20%), and Google has quietly trimmed an estimated 1,500–3,000+ engineers across Cloud and security units.
Why it matters: The 10% Nasdaq underperformance following AI-cited layoff announcements suggests investors are reading the cuts as cost reduction dressed in AI language rather than a credible productivity transformation — meaning executives who keep reaching for the AI explanation without delivering the gains risk a widening credibility gap with the market.
