US based project management software firmClickUphas laid off 22 per cent of its employees. The founder and CEO Zeb Evans describes the layoff not as a cost saving measure but as a deliberate restructuring around artificial intelligence.
He further promised the savings will flow back to the remaining employees through salary bands of up to $1 million a year.
Evans posted about his decision on X, taking personal ownership of the move and insisting the company is acting from a position of financial strength rather than distress. He wrote "The business is the strongest it's ever been," and further added that he chose transparency over allowing market forces to gradually make the decision for him.
He calls the layoff the "100xorganisation" which is a model designed around three core archetypes, i.e., Builders, System Managers, and Front Liners. The primary thing is that AI has not simply made every employee more productive but has fundamentally changed which roles create value in the first place.
For engineers, Evans said that the best engineers are no longer writing codes; now they are orchestrating and reviewing agentswhichwrite codes for them.
What the New Structure Actually Looks Like
ClickUpis merging product, design, and project management roles into new integrated teams. A new layer of Agent Managers is also being introduced, focused entirely on overseeing AI agents rather than doing traditional work themselves.
Evans is not shy about what this means. The cuts hit product, engineering, design, and customer-facing roles. In the months before the layoffs,ClickUphad already been runningroughly 3,000internal AI agents across its departments, which works out to a ratio of about 3 agents for every human employee. That number tells you everything about where the company is headed.
Big Pay for the People Who Stay
One part of Evans's announcement that stood out was the pay structure.ClickUpis introducing salary bands that can reach up to $1 million in cash annually for staff whodemonstratesignificant contributions through AI use. That is not a stock option promise or a vague performance bonus. It is a direct signal that the company wants to keep a smaller, highly skilled workforce and pay them well for it.
Evans framed it simply: the money saved by cutting jobs goes back to the people whoremain. Whether that lands as reassuring or unsettlingprobably dependson which side of the cut you ended up on.
A Bet on AI,Nota Rescue Plan
ClickUpreportedroughly $300 millionin annual recurring revenue as of 2025 and has been eyeing an IPO. The company alsoacquiredAIcoding platformCodegenlate last year. This is not a struggling startup trying to survive. It is a profitable company choosing to rebuild itself around a smaller team that manages AI systems rather than doing the work those systems now handle.
Evans argues that unmanaged AI adoption actually creates more chaos, not less.His view is that direct customer interaction is the least automatable role, and it becomes more valuable as AI takes over other communication. Front-line roles dealing with real customers are, in his words, worth protecting.
Not Everyone Is Buying It
The announcement has drawn mixed reactions. Some see Evans as honest and ahead of the curve. Others feel the framing of "we are thriving, so we are cutting jobs" is a hard pill to swallow regardless of how it is packaged.
In China, courts have ruled that replacing workers with AI is not a legal basis for dismissal. In the US, no such protection exists. For the hundreds ofClickUpemployees who lost their jobs this week, the distinction is not justlegal;it is personal.
Competitors like Asana and Monday.com are watching closely. IfClickUp'smodel works, others will follow.