Project management software firm ClickUp has laid off 22% of its workforce, with founder and Chief Executive Officer Zeb Evans framing the sweeping cuts not as a cost-saving measure but as a deliberate restructuring around artificial intelligence.
He also promised the savings will flow back to employees who remain, through salary bands of up to $1 million a year.
Evans announced the decision on X, taking personal ownership of the move and insisting the company is acting from a position of financial strength rather than distress. "The business is the strongest it's ever been," he wrote, adding that he chose transparency over allowing market forces to gradually make the decision for him.
At the heart of the restructuring is what Evans calls the "100x organisation" — a model built around three core archetypes: Builders, System Managers, and Front-Liners. The underlying thesis is that AI has not simply made every employee more productive, but has fundamentally changed which roles create value in the first place.
Today we reduced headcount by 22%. The business is the strongest it's ever been. So I think it's important to be direct about what I'm seeing and why.
— Zeb Evans (@DJ_CURFEW) May 21, 2026
First, I made this decision and I own it. I did it because the way to operate at the highest level of productivity is changing,…
On the engineering side, Evans argued that the best engineers are no longer writing code — they are orchestrating and reviewing agents that write code.
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Spreading AI tools across an entire engineering team, he warned, creates bottlenecks rather than output. "AI makes the best engineers wildly more productive, and everyone else using AI slows these engineers down," he wrote. The goal is to concentrate resources on a smaller number of high-judgment engineers who can direct AI systems at scale.
Product management is also being reshaped. Evans envisions PM and design roles merging, with product managers iterating in sandboxed environments rather than shipping directly to production — a model he believes eliminates the design-to-product bottleneck entirely.
The one category Evans said cannot be automated is direct customer interaction. Front-liners, he argued, will only grow in importance as AI-generated communication floods the market, making genuine human engagement a premium that companies cannot afford to outsource to agents.
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To retain the employees who remain, ClickUp is scrapping conventional compensation structures and introducing $1 million annual salary bands, accessible to nearly anyone in the company who demonstrates outsized impact through AI.
Evans closed with a broader warning to the industry: "Nearly every company will make changes like these. The ones that do it proactively will define what comes next."
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