Monday.com cut approximately 630 employees on July 22, 2026, roughly 20% of its global workforce. CEO Roy Mann was direct about why: the company is restructuring around AI agents, not cost savings, and the roles being cut are ones the company now expects AI tooling to absorb.

This is different from the AI-adjacent layoffs we have seen at other companies. Monday.com is not reducing headcount because business is slow or because a product line failed. It is reducing headcount because the company has concluded that running its support, operations, and mid-layer product functions with human teams no longer makes sense when AI agents can handle those workflows.

What Actually Happened

The cuts concentrated in three areas: customer support, internal operations, and middle-management layers that existed largely to coordinate and route work across teams. These are exactly the functions that agentic AI handles well: triaging tickets, tracking project status, updating records, and handing off tasks between systems.

Mann framed the move as forward-looking, not reactive. The company is not cutting and walking away. It is replacing one mode of operating with another, betting that a smaller, AI-augmented team can handle more volume than a larger traditional one.

Earlier this year, the pressure on Monday.com became visible in an unexpected way. CNBC reporters with no coding background used Claude Code to build a functioning replacement for Monday.com’s core project tracking features in under an hour for less than $15. The demonstration went viral and helped accelerate a stock selloff that had already been underway. That moment did not cause this restructuring, but it illustrated the competitive reality the company is responding to.

The Broader Pattern

Monday.com is not the only software company doing this. Over 100,000 tech industry jobs have been cut in 2026, with a growing number of employers explicitly citing AI as the reason. What makes the Monday.com case notable is the transparency: management described it as a structural change in how software companies must operate, not a temporary adjustment.

The logic that is playing out across the industry goes like this. If AI agents can handle the coordination, documentation, and routing work that human teams used to do, then the headcount model for running a software company changes fundamentally. Fewer seats are needed per workflow. The question stops being how many support staff do we need, and starts being what do we need humans to do that agents cannot.

What This Means for Business

For business owners and executives watching this, there are two things worth paying attention to.

The first is that this is not just a tech-company story. The same dynamic applies in any business where significant headcount exists to manage information flow, coordinate between systems, or handle repetitive customer interactions. Support teams, operations coordinators, and middle-management layers that exist to route work are the same targets in any industry.

The second is that the companies surviving this transition are not the ones that cut and walk away. They are the ones that understand which work humans still need to lead, and invest in making those humans more capable. The firms that are getting this right have leaders who understand AI well enough to make deliberate decisions about what to automate and what to keep human.

This is where data literacy and AI fluency become operationally critical. The people who remain after a restructuring like this need to work alongside AI agents, evaluate their outputs, and course-correct when things go wrong. That requires more skill, not less.

Enterprise DNA’s Learn platform exists precisely for this moment. Teams that build real competency in data and AI are the ones positioned to take advantage of these tools, not just be displaced by them. The upskilling gap is real: only 42% of enterprise leaders provide foundational data literacy training at scale, and companies that pair AI investments with structured upskilling programs are twice as likely to see positive ROI.

Monday.com’s restructuring is a preview of what more industries will face in the next 18 months. The question is whether your business is building the capability to lead that shift or just watching it happen.

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Enterprise DNA helps data and business professionals build the AI and data skills to navigate this transition. Explore courses and learning paths at enterprisedna.co.