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Monday.com is the latest tech company to blame AI for layoffs — here are 20 others

Six hundred people lost their jobs this week because a work management software company decided it needed to be "AI-first." Monday.com is the latest tech company to blame AI for layoffs — and it won't be the last. If you're a developer or founder in Asia watching this unfold, the pattern is worth understanding clearly, not just as a headline, but as a structural shift that's already reshaping how teams are built everywhere, including here.

What Happened

On Wednesday, July 23, 2026, Monday.com filed an SEC filing announcing it would cut roughly 20% of its workforce — just over 600 employees — as part of a restructuring plan tied to what it called an "AI-driven growth strategy." The company framed the cuts as a strategic pivot, not a cost-reduction exercise. Co-founder Eran Zinman went on LinkedIn to say the move "was not made to reduce costs or replace people with AI," but rather to reshape the organization around an AI-first vision the company announced about a year ago.

The financial math tells a more complicated story. Monday.com expects $45 million to $55 million in net restructuring charges while still projecting up to 20% year-over-year revenue growth for 2026. That's an aggressive bet: spend big now, restructure the human layer, and let AI carry more of the operational load going forward.

Monday.com isn't operating in isolation. According to TechCrunch's running list, U.S. tech companies have cut nearly 140,000 jobs since January 2026, with Amazon, Oracle, Meta, and Microsoft alone accounting for close to 50,000 of those cuts — all while funneling hundreds of billions into AI data center buildouts. A Financial Times analysis found that companies citing AI as a factor in layoffs have actually underperformed the Nasdaq by almost 10% in the 30 trading days following their announcements. The market, it turns out, is skeptical of the narrative. Investors aren't automatically rewarding companies for saying the word "AI" when people are losing jobs in the same breath.

There is a counterweight. AI-focused companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are hiring rapidly, absorbing some of the displaced talent. And within some of the cutting companies, headcount is shifting rather than vanishing entirely. But the net effect for mid-level knowledge workers — especially those in roles like project coordination, content operations, and customer support — is real displacement, and it's accelerating.

Why It Matters for Asia

Asia's tech industry tends to watch Western layoff cycles with some distance, but this wave is different. The companies cutting jobs aren't struggling — they're profitable or growing. Monday.com still projects 20% revenue growth. Meta's stock is near all-time highs. These aren't distress signals; they're deliberate architectural decisions about where humans sit in the production stack.

For Asia tech, that has direct implications. Enterprise software adoption in Southeast Asia, India, and East Asia has historically lagged the West by one to three years. That lag is compressing fast. The same AI tooling that Monday.com is restructuring around — AI agents handling workflow automation, AI-assisted go-to-market, AI-generated content pipelines — is already available to startups in Singapore, Jakarta, Bangalore, and Seoul at a fraction of the cost it took to build two years ago.

What this means practically: the talent structures that Asian tech companies built in the 2018–2023 growth era — large QA teams, manual data operations, human-heavy customer success — are under the same pressure that Western companies are now acting on. The difference is that many Asian companies haven't yet made the structural call. They're still in the "we're experimenting with AI" phase while their Western counterparts are already in the "we restructured around AI" phase.

There's also a hiring opportunity hiding in this data. If Anthropic and OpenAI are absorbing displaced talent from Monday.com, Meta, and Oracle, that talent pipeline doesn't stop at the U.S. border. Asian AI labs, well-funded startups in Singapore and India, and MonstarX — building Asia's AI-native dev platform — are all competing for engineers who just got freed from legacy enterprise environments and are now open to building something new.

The question for Asian founders isn't whether this wave will reach them. It already has. The question is whether they're restructuring proactively or waiting to be forced.

What This Means for Developers

If you're a developer in Asia right now, the Monday.com news is both a warning and a signal. The warning: roles that sit adjacent to software development — technical project management, manual QA, documentation writing, integration support — are being automated faster than most teams have planned for. The signal: the developers who understand how to build with AI, not just build AI, are becoming disproportionately valuable.

The distinction matters. "Building AI" means training models, fine-tuning, running inference infrastructure. That's a relatively small talent pool. "Building with AI" means knowing how to wire AI capabilities into real products — how to use an LLM for intent classification in a customer support flow, how to build an agent that handles onboarding logic, how to ship a feature in days that used to take a sprint. That skill set is accessible to any developer willing to invest the time, and it's the one the market is pricing up right now.

Concretely, here's what that looks like in practice:

• Workflow automation: Tasks that Monday.com's cut employees used to handle manually — status updates, cross-team notifications, reporting — are being replaced by event-driven automations that a single developer can build and maintain.
• AI-assisted code review and testing: The QA headcount reduction happening across the industry isn't because quality matters less. It's because AI-assisted testing tools can cover regression testing at a scale that human QA teams can't match cost-effectively.
• Leaner go-to-market engineering: Monday.com specifically cited changes to its "marketing and go-to-market strategy." That's a signal that AI is compressing the engineering surface area of growth — fewer people needed to run experiments, generate copy, personalize outreach.

For developers building on platforms that already have connectors to the tools in their stack, the shift is less disruptive and more of an accelerant. The ability to integrate AI capabilities without rebuilding infrastructure from scratch is exactly the kind of leverage that separates teams shipping fast from teams still planning their AI strategy in a slide deck.

The harder truth is that "learn to use AI tools" is no longer differentiated advice. The developers who will be most resilient are the ones who understand the business logic well enough to know which parts of a workflow are worth automating and which parts still require human judgment. That's a product sense problem as much as a technical one.

Key Takeaways

The Monday.com restructuring is one data point in a much larger pattern. Here's what the full picture suggests:

• AI-cited layoffs are not a crisis signal — they're a strategic signal. The companies cutting headcount while citing AI are mostly growing. They're not cutting because they're failing; they're cutting because they believe fewer humans can do more with AI in the loop. Whether that bet pays off is a separate question — the FT data on post-announcement Nasdaq underperformance suggests the market has doubts — but the intent is deliberate.
• The 140,000 jobs cut in U.S. tech in 2026 is a floor, not a ceiling. As AI tooling matures and enterprise adoption accelerates, the restructuring pressure will spread to more companies, more geographies, and more role types. Asia tech is not immune.
• Talent is redistributing, not disappearing. Anthropic and OpenAI are hiring. AI-native startups are hiring. The developers and operators being displaced from legacy enterprise software companies are going somewhere — and the best ones are going to the places building what comes next.
• The companies that will look prescient in three years are the ones restructuring now with a clear AI-native vision, not the ones restructuring reactively. Monday.com's co-founder insists this is about vision, not cost-cutting. Time will tell if that's true. But the framing itself — "we're building for an AI-first world" — is the right question to be asking, regardless of how any one company answers it.
• For Asian developers and founders, the window to build AI-native is open but not permanent. The structural advantage of being early in a market that hasn't yet consolidated around AI workflows is real. That window closes as the tools commoditize and the incumbents finish their restructuring.

The companies on TechCrunch's running list of AI-cited layoffs aren't villains or visionaries — they're organizations making bets under uncertainty, the same way every developer and founder is right now. What separates the ones who come out ahead isn't whether they embraced AI, but whether they understood clearly what they were actually building toward when they did.

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