ClickUp’s CEO just made a choice that feels almost calculated in its harshness. Cut 22% of the workforce. Keep the rest. Pay them like they’re gods.
Zeb Evans, who runs the cloud-based productivity platform, announced the layoffs on X this week with a message that reads less like an apology and more like a manifesto. “This wasn’t about cutting costs,” he wrote. “Most savings from this change will flow directly back into the people who stay. We’ll be introducing million-dollar salary bands.”
The math is seductive if you’re on the winning side. Lose a fifth of your headcount. Redistribute those savings into stratospheric compensation for survivors. It’s a winner-takes-all worldview dressed up as meritocracy.
The AI Mandate Changes Everything
What’s driving this isn’t just spreadsheet optimization. According to reporting from Business Insider, ClickUp has been on an AI adoption spree internally. One growth operations manager at the company told Business Insider that he personally oversees 37 AI agents and that the company has a mandate to embed AI agents deeper into workflows. The culture, he suggested, is built around sharing and scaling these automations.
Evans’ vision for the company is blunt: reach “100x output.” Not gradual improvement. Not incremental gains. A fundamental rebuild around artificial intelligence.
The company is carving its future workforce into three buckets. “Builders” and “system managers” will mostly oversee AI systems and automate parts of their own jobs. “Front-liners” handle customer relationships and represent what Evans calls “the human touch.” In other words, some people are being designed to be redundant from day one, while others become indispensable.
A Trend Rippling Across Tech
ClickUp isn’t alone in this calculation. Meta laid off over 8,000 employees while simultaneously waging a multibillion-dollar war to poach AI talent from competitors like OpenAI. Amazon, Cloudflare, and Atlassian have all tied their recent layoffs directly to AI adoption. It’s a pattern now, not an anomaly.
The technology industry is sorting itself into tiers at lightning speed. A small cluster of elite AI practitioners and builders commands unprecedented compensation. Everyone else is either automated away or left scrambling for scraps.
This isn’t just business strategy. It’s a statement about how companies see their future. Not as places where most people contribute incrementally, but as operations where a small group of elite talent and AI systems do the heavy lifting while a lean support staff manages the human relationships that still require warmth.
For ClickUp employees who survived, a million-dollar salary band probably feels like vindication. For the 22% who didn’t, it probably feels like a different kind of message: you weren’t extreme enough to justify keeping around.
The real question isn’t whether this works. It probably will, at least financially. The question is whether this is actually what productivity looks like, or just what efficiency looks like when you stop counting the human cost.
