Companies like IBM and Salesforce said cuts were a result of AI.
In February, CEO Jack Dorsey announced that Block was eliminating approximately 40% of staff.
Klarna's workforce has halved in the last four years, and its CEO says it will shrink more.
Worries about AI one day replacing human workers have intensified recently— and as it turns out, that future may be here.
We're only a few months into 2026 and already we've seen a number of major companies cut staff and cite AI efficiencies as a major rationale.
A March report from career transition firm Challenger, Gray, and Christmas found that so far this year, AI has been cited in 8% of job cut plans.
Amid this rash oflayoffs, some have asked whether AI is replacing so many roles once held by humans or whether some degree of "AI washing" is at work. OpenAI's Sam Altman said some companies are blaming AI for layoffs that would've happened regardless.
An MIT study released last year said that 95% of corporate AI investments have generated "zero return" so far.
Even as some companies replace human workers with the technology, they may end up hiring more people because of it — or rehiring at least some of the roles they eliminated. A 2025 survey conducted by consulting firm Robert Half found that 29% of 2,000 hiring managers said they reopened positions that had been previously got rid of after implementing AI.
Here's a list of companies that have done AI-related layoffs:
Atlassian
Last year, Atlassian CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes said that his company would have more engineers working for it in five years than it did then.
Brendan McDermid/Reuters
Atlassian announced cuts of 1,600 jobs in March, totaling about 10% of its global workforce. The move comes as the Australian-American software company says it is restructuring to focus on AI and enterprise growth.
In a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, the company said the reduction was part of a broader effort to reposition the business for what CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes described as the "AI era."
"It would be disingenuous to pretend AI doesn't change the mix of skills we need or the number of roles required in certain areas. It does," Cannon-Brookes wrote in a message to employees.
On the "20VC" podcast in October last year, prior to the cuts, Cannon-Brookes said he planned to have more engineers at the company in five years.
"They will be more efficient, but technology creation is not output-bound," Cannon-Brookes said.
Block
Joe Raedle/Getty Images
In a post on X in February, billionaire and Block CEO Jack Dorsey said he was slashing nearly half of Block's workforce, cutting its over 10,000-person staff to under 6,000. The move came as he said business was strong and profits were growing, but a new way of working was emerging.
"We're already seeing that the intelligence tools we're creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company," Dorsey said in his memo on X.
In the company's earnings call that followed the memo, Dorsey said that more companies will follow suit in using AI to drive efficiency gains. Block is already ahead of the trend that "all companies will eventually" adopt, the CEO said.
Crypto.com
Marco Bello/Reuters
Crypto.com announced on March 19 that it would cut 12% of its staff. The CEO, Kris Marszalek, wrote in a post on X that those impacted were in "roles that do not adapt in our new world."
"We are joining the list of companies integrating enterprise-wide AI," Marszalek wrote on X. "Companies that move immediately and pair the best AI tools with top-performers will achieve a level of scale and precision that was previously impossible. This is where we must go."
The company previously cut jobs in 2022 during a cryptocurrency slump and another 20% of its workforce in 2023, following the collapse of FTX.
HP
Lores ends each day with reflection about HP's present and future.
HP Inc.
HP said it's reducing the size of its corporate workforce as a result of AI initiatives. In an earnings report last November, the company said it plans to cut between 4,000 and 6,000 jobs by the end of 2028, estimating the changes would save around $1 billion.
HP's earnings presentation at the timesaid part of its strategy was to cut costs through "workforce reductions, platform simplification, programs consolidation, and productivity measures" and to increase customer satisfaction, innovation, and productivity with "artificial intelligence adoption and enablement."
IBM
Arvind Krishna has been spent his entire career at IBM. He was made CEO of the company in 2020.
Sajjad Hussain/Getty Images
Arvind Krishna, CEO of IBM, told The Wall Street Journal last yearthat it had replaced hundreds of human resources employees with AI.
More recently, the company announced last November that it would cut thousands of workers in the fourth quarter of 2025, affecting a "single-digit percentage of its global workforce." Its CEO, Arvind Krishna, said the company is shifting priorities to hire more people around AI and quantum. He also said the company plans to increase hiring among recent college graduates over the next year.
Krishna has also said AI adoption has led to the company hiring more employees in programming and sales.
In 2023, Krishna told Bloomberg that IBM had halted or slowed hiring for back-office roles, like in human resources, that could be replaced by AI.
"I could easily see 30% of that getting replaced by AI and automation over a five-year period," he told the outlet at the time.
Klarna
Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski
David M. Benett/Getty Images for Klarna
Klarna's CEO says its workforce has halved over the last four years and will shrink further in the coming years.
In an interview with Harry Stebbings on the "20 VC" podcast on Monday, Sebastian Siemiatkowski said there are about 3,000 employees at Klarna, and he expects the company's workforce to drop below 2,000 by 2030. The company had 7,000 employees in 2022, he said.
The CEO said the reduction is a result of layoffs and "natural attrition," which is when the company doesn't replace workers who leave.
Siemiatkowski said on Monday that "human connection" will be vital for the company, and jobs involved in that will not be replaced by AI.
"Those jobs will remain, but for the rest it's going to be definitely smaller," he said.
Klarna declined to comment further when contacted by Business Insider. A spokesperson previously said that its AI assistant handles the equivalent workload of 853 full-time agents, up from 700 at launch. The spokesperson said it was saving the company an estimated $58 million annually.
Salesforce
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff says Gemini 3 is so advanced that he has stopped using ChatGPT.
AP Photo/Markus Schreiber
Salesforce cut fewer than 1,000 workers in February, including employees from marketing, product management, data analytics, and its Agentforce AI product.
In an episode of "The Logan Bartlett Show" released last August, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said the company was using AI agents in its customer support division to replace humans and help the company work through more sales leads.
"I was able to rebalance my head count on my support," he said in the interview. "I've reduced it from 9,000 heads to about 5,000 because I need less heads."
A Salesforce spokesperson told Business Insider previously that Benioff was referencing an organizational transformation that took place over several months to reshape its customer support function.
After deploying Agentforce, the company no longer needed to "actively backfill support engineer roles," the spokesperson said, adding that it successfully redeployed hundreds of employees into other areas of the company, like professional services, sales, and customer success.
Wisetech
Wisetech is cutting 2,000 jobs.
Illustration by Thomas Fuller/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
Zubin Appoo, the CEO of Wisetech, said the logistics software maker is cutting 2,000 jobs, or 30% of its staff, because of AI-led efficiency.
In a conference call on February 25, Appoo said that AI enables greater productivity in less time and with fewer employees. The Sydney-based company employed about 7,000 people, according to an annual report released in October.
"I am prepared to say this clearly: the era of manually writing code as the core act of engineering is over," Appoo said. The technology is "unlocking levels of efficiency gains across WiseTech that were previously out of reach."
In some parts of the workforce, such as customer service, one in two workers will disappear, he added.
Angi
Bloomberg/Getty Images
Angi, the popular contractor listing site previously known as Angie's List, said in January that it was cutting roughly 350 jobs in part because of "AI-driven efficiency improvements."
The company added that the cuts were part of a plan "to reduce operating expenses and optimize the organizational structure in support of long-term growth."