Monday.com Cuts 20% of Workforce, About 620 Jobs, to Refocus on AI Platform

Monday.com is cutting about 620 jobs, roughly 20% of its global workforce, as part of a restructuring built around what the company calls its AI Work Platform, according to a Form 6-K disclosure reported by Business Insider.

The Israeli workplace software maker will take $45 million to $55 million in charges tied to the move, according to TechCrunch. That's real money for a company whose stock, per Business Insider, has slumped roughly 75% over the past year.

Co-founders and co-CEOs Roy Mann and Eran Zinman broke the news to staff in a letter Wednesday, calling it the "most painful decision" since the company's founding, according to calcalistech. "We entered a new era where AI is transforming the role of software, creating the greatest opportunity our industry has ever seen," they wrote. "We have a new market to capture. Without a fundamental change in how we operate, we will not be able to compete and win that market."

What Monday.com says this isn't

Management is going out of its way to say this is not a cost play and not AI replacing humans. Zinman wrote that the decision "was not made to reduce costs or replace people with AI," according to Business Insider. The Jerusalem Post reported the company framed it the same way: not a short-term cost-cutting measure, not the result of AI-based efficiency gains, but a reallocation of resources toward employees, product development, AI engines and growth.

Monday.com says it's flattening its management structure, cutting layers to build smaller, more autonomous teams, and adopting a new go-to-market model to walk existing customers into AI tools while chasing new customers who expect AI from day one, according to the Jerusalem Post.

The company also says it's still hiring in priority areas even as it cuts elsewhere, according to Business Insider, and that departing employees get a package including financial assistance, accelerated stock vesting, continued medical coverage and help finding new jobs, with the CEOs reportedly reaching out directly to other tech companies that are hiring, according to the Jerusalem Post.

The skeptical read

Here's the problem for that narrative: Monday.com is doing exactly what a huge wave of tech companies did this year, and they're all using nearly identical language.

According to TechCrunch, 78% of companies that conducted layoffs in 2026 cited a need to refocus around AI, based on Layoffs.fyi data. More than 122,000 tech jobs have been cut so far this year, and May alone saw layoffs hit a level unseen in years. Business Insider noted Monday.com joins a list that includes Snap and Block, both of which cited AI while cutting staff.

So when a company says "this isn't about cost-cutting" while simultaneously disclosing $45-55 million in restructuring charges and slashing a fifth of its payroll, reasonable people are going to raise an eyebrow. Nobody's accusing Mann and Zinman of lying. But "AI transformation" has become the go-to explanation of 2026, whether the layoffs are driven by genuine strategic pivots or plain old belt-tightening dressed up for investors.

It's also important to be precise about scale. TechCrunch put the number at 630 employees. Calcalistech and the Jerusalem Post both cited approximately 620. Monday.com's own 2025 annual report listed 3,155 total employees, according to Business Insider, so a 20% cut lands somewhere in that 620-630 range depending on rounding and timing.

Market reaction and what's still unclear

Business Insider reported the stock rose through the morning after the announcement before ticking back down, a fairly muted reaction given the scale of the cuts. That's a stock price move, not a verdict from investors on the strategy, and it doesn't tell us who bought or sold or what any specific shareholder gained or lost.

What's not yet clear is which departments and roles are most affected, whether the cuts are concentrated in Israel or spread across Monday.com's global offices, and how quickly the promised AI-agent product buildout will translate into revenue that justifies the disruption. The company's AI Work Platform currently includes a no-code app builder, a customizable AI agent, a workflow automation tool, and a chatbot for tasks like generating reports, according to TechCrunch. Whether that lineup is enough to win the "new market" Mann and Zinman say they're chasing will depend on the company's next few earnings reports.