Monday.com joined a list that is becoming embarrassingly long this week. In a filing to the US securities regulator, the Tel Aviv firm that sells colourful boards for organising work announced it is cutting around 20 percent of its workforce - a little over 600 people. The official reason: "restructuring" tied to a "transformation of product, marketing and go-to-market", all in service of a "more agile, more focused operating structure" while investing in an "AI-led growth strategy".

Translated from corporate into human: six hundred people go home, and software stays on stage.

Co-founder Eran Zinman told employees the decision "was not made to cut costs or to replace people with artificial intelligence". That is a sentence worth reading twice. The company is simultaneously projecting up to 20 percent revenue growth this year and expects between 45 and 55 million dollars in costs from the restructuring itself. If that is not replacing people with machines, then it is at least an excellent example of what the replacement gets called when you would rather not call it by its name.

The number that tells the story

According to a Financial Times analysis, US technology companies have laid off nearly 140,000 people since the start of the year. Amazon, Oracle, Meta and Microsoft alone account for almost 50,000 of them - the same companies simultaneously pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into building AI data centres. The money did not vanish. It just moved from wages into concrete, cables and electricity.

But here is the part rarely read in the press releases. The same analysis found that companies citing artificial intelligence as the reason for layoffs subsequently trailed the Nasdaq index by almost 10 percent over the thirty trading days after the announcement. The market, it seems, does not swallow the story as easily as it is written.

And the story is fairly well rehearsed. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince explained that "the vast majority of those laid off last week were measurers". Snap's chief Evan Spiegel wrote that "rapid progress in AI is enabling our teams to reduce repetitive work". Block founder Jack Dorsey mentioned a "new way of working" with "smaller and flatter teams". Each of them has their own formulation. No two are identical, and they all mean the same thing.

It is not all bleak - but it is not what they are selling either

There is another side. Anthropic and OpenAI are hiring fast and absorbing some of the people others are letting go. Meta moved around 7,000 employees into new AI-related positions this year while laying off 8,000 others. IBM claims it is tripling entry-level hiring for such roles. So some people are not disappearing - they are being relocated. The problem is that relocation requires new expertise, and the number of people who have it is far smaller than the number who lost their jobs.

This year's list is long and specific: Dell 11,000, Amazon 16,000, Oracle 21,000 over twelve months, PayPal over 4,500, Cisco 4,000, Microsoft 4,800, Meta 8,000, Intuit 3,000, Coinbase 700. These are not estimates, they are announcements.

Balkan IT firms are not on that list, at least not yet - but the sector here works mainly for foreign clients. When Amazon or Oracle cut budgets, the orders are not only cut in Seattle. The question is how long it takes a wave from Tel Aviv and California to reach Skopje, Belgrade and Zagreb, and whether anyone will announce it at all or whether we will find out from press releases just like these, using the same words.