Cloud productivity platform ClickUp has adopted a “winner-takes-all” approach to its hiring policy. The company’s CEO announced a 22% cut in its workforce, while promising employees who remain the opportunity to earn millions in salaries.
Cloud productivity platform ClickUp has adopted a “winner-takes-all” approach to its hiring policy. The company’s CEO announced a 22% cut in its workforce, while promising employees who remain the opportunity to earn millions in salaries.
“This was not an attempt to cut costs,” CEO Zeb Evans wrote in X. “Most of the savings from these changes will go directly to the people who stay. We are implementing salary scales in the millions. If you produce a superpower result thanks to AI, your compensation will be significantly higher than the standard framework.”
The cuts come after several months of rapid implementation of artificial intelligence within the company, which is focused on centralizing corporate workflows and communications.
Andy Cabasso, the company's operations development manager at ClickUp, recently told Business Insider that the company has a mandate to use AI agents more often and a culture of sharing effective AI tools. Cabasso said he personally manages 37 AI agents.
As of 2021, ClickUp was valued at approximately $4 billion. According to a 2023 blog post, the company had over 1,000 employees.
In his post, Evans noted that the company’s new goal is to achieve “100x productivity gains.” He added that instead of incrementally improving existing systems, ClickUp needs to completely rebuild from the ground up around artificial intelligence.
Evans also divided the company’s future workforce into three categories: “builders,” “system managers,” and “frontliners.” The first two groups, he described, will mostly oversee AI systems and automate some of their own work, while the last group will focus on customer relationships and embody the “human factor.”
