There’s something almost uncomfortably candid about the way Zeb Evans, ClickUp’s CEO, framed the company’s recent decision to slash 22% of its workforce. This wasn’t a cost-cutting move, he insisted on X last Thursday. This was something more ambitious, more optimistic: a full-throated embrace of artificial intelligence that would propel the collaboration software startup to become what he called a “100x org.”
The timing was striking. The company, last valued at $4 billion in 2021, was essentially telling hundreds of employees their jobs were being replaced by 3,000 internal AI agents. But rather than frame this as a sad necessity, Evans spun it as a radical experiment in productivity. Most savings, he promised, would flow directly back into the people who stayed, with the company introducing million-dollar salary bands for workers who used AI to create “outsized impact.”
If that sounds like a bold claim, that’s because it is.
The AI Productivity Promise Gets Real
What ClickUp is attempting represents something that many tech companies have talked about but few have actually executed: a wholesale pivot to AI-mediated workflows. Instead of employees performing tasks themselves, they’re now expected to direct AI agents and review the output. It’s a fundamentally different mental model for work, one where humans become orchestrators rather than executors.
The company isn’t alone in pursuing this vision. According to a recent Gartner survey, about 80% of companies using autonomous tech have already cut jobs. The study found that workforce reductions aren’t necessarily translating into meaningful financial returns, which raises an uncomfortable question: are companies actually automating for productivity, or are they using unproven AI as a convenient excuse to downsize?
ClickUp insists it’s seeing real productivity gains. Evans told TechCrunch via email that the startup is measuring those efficiencies internally and apparently gearing up to include them in a forthcoming product for customers. The pitch is almost elegant: instead of gamifying token cost consumption, they want to gamify value created and time saved. This is a subtle but important distinction, and one that will determine whether this experiment holds up or becomes another cautionary tale of tech hubris.
The Tokenmaxxing Controversy
In recent months, a growing number of companies have started monitoring employee token consumption as a metric to see who is actually adopting AI tools. Critics have derided this approach as “tokenmaxxing,” arguing that it simply racks up AI expenses without necessarily driving meaningful productivity.
Evans seemed to acknowledge this criticism indirectly, though his confidence remained intact. “The people that automate their jobs with AI will always have a job,” he claimed in his post. But here’s the catch that he didn’t fully address: if AI keeps taking over more tasks, ClickUp will eventually need fewer and fewer people, eliminating those who fail to automate their functions well. The promise of million-dollar salaries only applies to those who successfully ride the AI wave. Everyone else gets left behind.
This creates a curious dynamic where the same technology that’s supposed to liberate workers also functions as a mechanism for筛选. Call it productivity Darwinism.
The Polsia Precedent
Tech circles have theorized about this scenario for years, but extreme examples are starting to emerge. Polsia, a one-year-old startup that claims to handle all software operations for solopreneurs, is run by just one person: its founder and CEO, Ben Broca. That’s not a typo. A $250 million valuation on $30 million in raised capital, with a single human at the helm and AI handling everything else.
It’s easy to dismiss Polsia as an outlier, a novelty that works only for a very specific kind of business. But the numbers are harder to ignore, and the trajectory is clear: what starts as an experiment at companies like ClickUp could eventually become the default operating model for entire industries.
The bigger question isn’t whether AI can replace workers. The technology already can, in many contexts. The harder question is what happens to the rest of us when the economic model shifts this dramatically, and whether the productivity gains will be distributed broadly enough to justify the disruption. Some will thrive in this new world, building million-dollar salary bands and 100x organizations. Others will simply become redundant.
The rest of the workforce is watching, waiting, and wondering which category they’ll fall into.
