Everybody's blaming AI for layoffs now. The stock market isn't buying it.

The update

Monday.com said in an SEC filing this week that it will cut about 20% of its workforce — just over 600 people — as part of a restructuring tied to its "AI-driven growth strategy," projecting $45M–$55M in net charges but still up to 20% revenue growth for 2026. It's the latest of many: FT analysis counts nearly 140,000 U.S. tech jobs cut since January, with Amazon, Oracle, Meta and Microsoft alone accounting for almost 50,000. Companies citing AI include Microsoft (4,800 roles), Oracle (21,000 over 12 months), Intuit (~3,000), Meta (8,000), Cisco (nearly 4,000), Cloudflare (~1,100) and GitLab (~350).

By the numbers

Under the hood

The framing is doing a lot of work across these announcements. Monday co-founder Eran Zinman told staff the move "was not made to reduce costs or replace people with AI," while Microsoft said its eliminated roles were "not being replaced by AI" but that "AI is changing how work gets done." Cisco's CFO insisted it was "really not a savings-driven restructure." Oracle was blunter, telling regulators that AI deployment "have resulted, and may continue to result, in reductions to our workforce." GitLab's Bill Staples framed its 350 cuts as funding a "generational rebuild" for agent-scale workloads, with the company exiting 22 countries.

The signal

"AI" has become the go-to explanation for hard workforce decisions, and it's worth separating real automation from convenient messaging. The most telling data point: the FT found companies that blame AI for cuts underperformed the Nasdaq by nearly 10% in the 30 trading days after their announcements. Investors, in other words, don't fully buy the story — and neither should you.

The backstory

Monday's cuts aren't out of nowhere — the company rebranded around a platform-wide AI push roughly a year ago, and this restructuring is the org chart catching up to that pitch. Several of these companies were cutting into strong numbers: Cisco reported better-than-expected profit and revenue, Cloudflare posted revenue up 34% year-over-year, and Google's Cloud division grew 63% past $20 billion even as it thinned managers by 35%.

The timeline

1. July 25, 2026
   Monday.com discloses ~20% workforce cut (600+ roles) in SEC filing
2. July 9, 2026
   Microsoft cuts ~4,800 roles, mostly in Xbox
3. June 22, 2026
   Oracle reveals 21,000 jobs cut over 12 months, citing AI
4. June 3, 2026
   GitLab lays off ~350 to fund AI infrastructure
5. May 20-21, 2026
   Meta cuts 8,000, Intuit cuts ~3,000, both citing AI

Who it's for

Founders

→how peers frame AI-driven restructuring

Enterprises

→market skepticism toward AI layoff messaging

The catch

The picture isn't uniformly grim. AI-first shops like Anthropic and OpenAI are hiring fast and absorbing displaced talent, and some of the cuts are really headcount shifting rather than vanishing — Meta moved about 7,000 people into new AI roles (which they reportedly hate) while laying off 8,000, and IBM says it's tripling entry-level hiring for AI and hybrid-cloud roles. Google, notably, has never announced a single number; outside estimates put its 2026 total between 1,500 and 3,000+ engineers.

What to watch

Watch whether the "AI-driven" framing keeps spreading and whether the market keeps penalizing it. The real test for Monday and the rest is whether the leaner headcount actually delivers the growth they're promising — Monday is still projecting up to 20% revenue growth for 2026.