GitLab cuts 14% of staff to scale platform for AI processes
The GitLab developer platform has laid off about 14% of its staff, which is approximately 350 employees.
The GitLab developer platform has laid off about 14% of its staff, which is approximately 350 employees.
In May, the company announced its intention to reduce staff by exiting 22 countries, reducing the number of management layers, and investing in infrastructure. The company believes that this decision will also provide an opportunity to scale the platform and ensure stable operation in conditions of increasing traffic from AI processes, with a special emphasis on research and development, writes TechCrunch.
The company's CEO, Bill Staples, said that the activity of AI agents is overloading the platform's infrastructure more than expected. And this problem is not unique to GitLab. The company's competitor, GitHub, is also struggling to cope with the massive influx of requests and code generated by artificial intelligence, which has already affected the stability of its services.
“AI agents are operating at machine speed and scale, and this is pushing competitors to the edge. This quarter, we began a fundamental, generational overhaul of git to deliver the scalability and functionality needed to grow 100x. Previously, these scale requirements simply did not exist, and today it has become a real pain point for every team that begins to implement autonomous agents in their processes,” Staples said.
Staples said the company has partnered with an unnamed AI lab to design and repurpose its infrastructure for AI processes, as well as to create APIs “optimized for AI agents to store and retrieve context, including code.” The company is also investing in orchestration tools to coordinate software development between AI agents and human developers, create a context layer, and integrate control and security tools directly into its platform.
GitLab thus joins a number of tech giants, including Intuit, Amazon, Block, Cisco , Cloudflare , Meta , Microsoft, and Oracle, that have also carried out large-scale layoffs, explaining this by the need to make artificial intelligence the core of their business. According to the Statista platform, the technosphere has already lost more than 100,000 jobs this year, and if the trend of layoffs continues, the current figures risk exceeding the figures of both 2024 and 2025.
This trend has become commonplace: companies report record profits while simultaneously cutting staff, with artificial intelligence cited as both a reason for growth and an excuse for layoffs.
Indeed, all of these companies have recently reported strong revenues and profits, indicating strong demand for AI products, services, or the infrastructure to enable them, and GitLab is no exception.
The company on Tuesday reported first-quarter revenue of $264 million, up 23% from a year earlier, and gross margin of 88%. It expects to take $30 million to $35 million in restructuring charges as part of the effort.
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