ClickUp cuts 22% of its workforce and promises remaining staff million-dollar salary bands

ClickUp chief executive Zeb Evans announced on Thursday that the cloud-based productivity platform has laid off 22 per cent of its workforce, whilst simultaneously promising that the employees who remain could be eligible for million-dollar salaries.

"This wasn't about cutting costs," Evans wrote on X. "Most savings from this change will flow directly back into the people who stay. We'll be introducing million-dollar salary bands."

"If you create outsized impact using AI, you'll be paid outside of traditional bands," he added.

Rapid AI adoption inside ClickUp

The redundancies follow months of accelerated AI adoption within the company, which centralises enterprise workflows and communications.

Andy Cabasso, a growth operations manager at ClickUp, recently told Business Insider that the company operates under a mandate to make greater use of AI agents and fosters an internal culture of sharing AI workflows. Cabasso said he personally oversees 37 AI agents.

Rebuilding from the ground up

In his post on X, Evans outlined an ambitious new direction for the business, setting a goal of achieving "100x output" and stating that rather than incrementally improving existing systems, ClickUp must rebuild itself from the ground up around artificial intelligence.

Evans also set out a new framework for the company's future workforce, dividing it into three categories: "builders," "system managers," and "front-liners."

The first two groups will primarily oversee AI systems and automate elements of their own roles, whilst the latter will focus on customer relationships and provide what Evans described as "the human touch."

ClickUp was valued at approximately $4 billion as of 2021. According to a company blog post from 2023, it employs more than 1,000 people.

A broader trend across the tech industry

The cuts at ClickUp reflect a wider pattern emerging across the technology sector, where hundreds or thousands of positions are being eliminated at a time whilst a small pool of elite AI talent is rewarded with record-breaking compensation.

Meta has waged a multibillion-dollar campaign to recruit talent from rivals including OpenAI over the past year, whilst also laying off more than 8,000 employees.

Amazon, Cloudflare and Atlassian have all carried out redundancies this year, with company leadership in each case directly linking the cuts to increased AI adoption.