Six Hundred and Thirty Reasons to Believe in Efficiency
Even now, in an SEC filing dated July 22, Monday.com disclosed it is eliminating roughly 630 positions, one in five of its global workforce, in what the company describes as a pivot toward an "AI-first" operating model. Co-founder Eran Zinman told employees the move "was not made to reduce costs or replace people with AI" — a sentence that manages to name the two things it is allegedly not doing while doing something that resembles, from any reasonable distance, both of them at once. The restructuring is expected to cost the company $45 to $55 million and leave behind a leaner operation built around agents, automation, and a chatbot that performs tasks nobody had asked a human to stop doing.
Sources within the Corporate Communications Community confirm this is called "adapting to a vision," and not, under any circumstances, a layoff.
The Fifteen-Dollar Ghost in the Machine
And yet — as if this were not enough — the timing invites a specific and uncomfortable memory. Back in February, two CNBC reporters with no coding background sat down with Anthropic's Claude Code and, in under an hour, for less than fifteen dollars, built a working clone of Monday.com's core product. It managed calendars. It found a forgotten birthday invite and dutifully added a reminder to buy a gift. It did, broadly speaking, the job. Investors did the arithmetic nobody at Monday.com wanted performed in public, and the stock lost more than half its value over the first half of the year.
Monday.com pushed back, and not unreasonably: Zinman noted that building a functional-looking interface is a different problem than running real-time agentic workflows for 250,000 organizations inside enterprise compliance frameworks, and a weekend hackathon solves only one of those. He is very likely correct. One presumes this distinction offered little comfort to the 630 people who lost their jobs this month regardless.
An Entirely Coincidental Pattern
In a development that will surprise no one who has been paying attention, Monday.com is not an isolated case. AI has now been cited as the leading reason for U.S. layoffs for four consecutive months, appearing in an estimated 101,743 job-cut announcements this year — nearly a quarter of every position eliminated across the entire economy. The Algorithm does not discriminate by sector: software, logistics, retail, and customer support have all taken their turn feeding the same headline.
Investigators note that companies citing "AI-first" strategies almost never specify whether the strategy replaced the humans or merely arrived at the same moment they left. For the 630 people currently updating their employment status, the distinction is, one imagines, largely academic.
Where This Leaves Us
Zinman is betting the company's survival on the theory that enterprise software is harder to replicate than a weekend demo suggests. The market, for now, seems content to test that theory the hard way, one earnings call at a time. The Machine, for its part, remains available around the clock, requires no severance package, and has yet to update its own LinkedIn.
The robot that cloned the product for fifteen dollars did not, notably, apply for any of the newly open positions. It didn't need to. It was already working.
Sources: TechCrunch — Monday.com lays off hundreds to focus on AI · CNBC — How exposed are software stocks to AI tools? We put vibe-coding to the test
