Atlassian Is Letting 1,600 People Go to Make Room for AI, India Bears 16% of the Blow

Atlassian, the Australian-American software company behind tools like Jira and Confluence, has announced that it would lay off roughly 1,600 employees, about 10% of its global workforce, as it redirects resources toward artificial intelligence and enterprise sales, according to Reuters.

The majority of the cuts will fall in North America, which accounts for 40% of affected employees, followed by Australia at 30% and India at 16%. The company is expected to take a financial hit of between $225 million and $236 million related to the layoffs and office space reductions.

In a memo to staff, CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes was candid about the role AI is playing. "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," he said, as quoted by Reuters.

Separately, Atlassian's Indian-origin Chief Technology Officer, Rajeev Rajan, who held the role for nearly four years, will officially step down on March 31. Before joining Atlassian, Rajan served as Vice President of Engineering at Meta and spent more than two decades at Microsoft.

Atlassian's announcement is part of a much larger pattern sweeping across the technology industry, where companies are investing heavily in AI and simultaneously cutting the human workforce.

Oracle, the American software giant, is preparing to lay off as many as 45,000 employees across multiple divisions, a figure that exceeds its previously confirmed range of 20,000 to 30,000 cuts, according to Bloomberg.

The reductions could begin as early as this month. The reason for the job cuts is Oracle spending enormous sums to build AI infrastructure and facing a cash crunch as a result. In other words, the same technology Oracle is spending billions to build is also being used to justify cutting the people who helped build it.

More recently, Block, the payments and technology company founded by Twitter Co-founder Jack Dorsey, announced it would cut 4,000 of its 10,000 employees.

The trend is not new. Through 2025, some of the biggest names in technology made sweeping cuts they directly attributed to AI-driven changes. Microsoft cut around 15,000 jobs, while Amazon and Salesforce both linked their reductions to AI-led shifts in how they operate.