ClickUp cuts roughly 20% of workforce in shift to AI-first operating model
CEO Zeb Evans says layoffs are strategic, not financially driven
Company plans salary bands up to $1mn for employees delivering high AI-driven impact
California-based productivity software firm ClickUp has laid off roughly a fifth of its workforce, with chief executive Zeb Evans framing the decision as a deliberate pivot to an AI-first operating model rather than a response to financial pressure.
Evans announced the cuts on X, insisting the business was in its strongest position yet and that he had chosen to act proactively rather than wait for market forces to force his hand. Most of the savings generated by the redundancies, he said, would be redirected back to remaining employees through new salary bands of up to $1mn a year — available to anyone in the company who demonstrates outsized impact through the use of AI.
1 May 2026
Get the latest issue of Outlook Business
The restructuring centres on what Evans is calling the "100x organisation," a model that divides the future workforce into three archetypes: Builders, System Managers and Front-Liners. The underlying argument is that AI has not simply made employees more productive across the board — it has fundamentally changed which roles create value in the first place.
In his view, the best engineers are no longer primarily writing code; they are orchestrating and reviewing the AI agents that do so. Distributing AI tools broadly across a large engineering team, he argued, creates bottlenecks rather than output. "AI makes the best engineers wildly more productive, and everyone else using AI slows these engineers down," he wrote.
Product management is also being reshaped under the new structure. Evans envisions product and design roles converging, with product managers iterating in sandboxed environments rather than shipping directly to production — a change he believes removes the design-to-product bottleneck that slows many teams down.
The one category he said AI cannot replace is direct customer interaction. Front-liners, he argued, will only grow in value as AI-generated communication becomes more prevalent, making genuine human engagement a premium businesses cannot afford to hand over to automated agents.
Evans closed with a wider industry warning: companies that make these structural changes proactively will define what comes next, while those that wait will be reshaped by circumstances beyond their control.
