ClickUp, the American startup for team work-organisation software, laid off 22 percent of its staff last week. And then it did something unusual: it called the layoff a „radical embrace of artificial intelligence", not a cost-cutting measure.

CEO Zeb Evans, in a post on X, said the savings from the reduction would go to those who stay. „We are introducing salary bands of up to a million dollars. If you create huge impact using AI, you will be paid outside the traditional bands." Translation: smaller team, higher pay, and autonomous AI doing tasks instead of people.

ClickUp already has around 3,000 internal AI agents performing complex tasks. Employees no longer do the work themselves - they direct the agents and then check the result. Evans's goal is for the company to become a „100x organisation" - ten thousand times more efficient with fewer people.

The numbers around this movement are confused. According to a recent Gartner survey, 80 percent of companies using autonomous technology have laid off staff. But the same study found that reducing the workforce does not necessarily translate to better financial results. In other words: AI is an excuse for layoffs, not a proven engine of profit.

Even when ClickUp claims it is genuinely measuring the productivity of its AI agents, we have to ask: what if that productivity does not show up in next year's books? What if the „100x organisation" turns out to be a 5x organisation with 22 percent of laid-off people who won't be coming back?

There is another, far more symbolic story: Polsia, a one-year-old startup with one employee, founder Ben Brock. He has automated everything with AI. He raised 30 million dollars at an estimated valuation of 250 million. If this is the future of work, then five founders will hire five engineers, and the rest of us stay out of the game. That is not a future - it is a catastrophe with better marketing.