ClickUp founder and CEO Zeb Evans is defending the company’s decision to cut 22% of its workforce, saying the move was not about financial trouble but about preparing the company for what he believes is the next era of work powered by artificial intelligence. 

In a long and unusually direct post on X, Evans said ClickUp is actually in its strongest position yet. He admitted the decision was difficult but said he chose to act now because the way companies operate is changing rapidly with AI. 

“Today we reduced headcount by 22%. The business is the strongest it’s ever been,” Evans wrote. “I made this decision, and I own it. I did it because the way to operate at the highest level of productivity is changing, and to win the future, ClickUp needs to change with it.” 

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‘100x engineers’ are replacing traditional workflows 

Evans repeatedly stressed that the layoffs were not done to save money. According to him, much of the savings from the cuts will be invested back into employees who stay at the company. 

He announced that ClickUp plans to introduce salary bands worth up to $1 million a year for workers who create what he described as “outsized impact” using AI. “If you create outsized impact using AI, you’ll be paid outside of traditional bands,” he wrote.

Evans said the company wants to reward employees who adapt quickly to AI-driven work and help build new systems inside the organisation. He also argued that companies should hold on to their best employees for decades because their experience and ability to manage AI systems will become extremely valuable.

What is the ‘100x organisation’? 

Evans kept emphasising the “100x organisation,” a new operating model built around AI agents and smaller, highly skilled teams. 

He argued that many companies are misunderstanding how AI changes productivity. In his view, AI does not automatically make everyone more efficient. Instead, old workflows can slow things down and create new bottlenecks.

“The goal is 100x output,” Evans wrote. “The roles required to build at the highest level are fundamentally different from what they were a year ago.” 

Evans said ClickUp is restructuring itself around new types of workers and roles that are designed specifically for AI-first systems. 

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‘100x engineers’ instead of traditional coders 

One of the most talked-about sections of Evans’ statement involved software engineers. He said the best engineers are no longer spending most of their time writing code themselves. Instead, they are directing AI agents that generate code, reviewing the output, and making high-level technical decisions. 

“They’re not writing code. They’re directing agents that write code,” Evans said.

According to him, the real value now comes from judgment, architecture, orchestration, and reviewing AI-generated work quickly and accurately.

He also warned that companies encouraging every engineer to endlessly generate code using AI tools may soon face problems.

“Companies doing this are celebrating 500% more pull requests. But customer outcomes don’t match the volume of code being generated,” he wrote. Evans described this as “the great reckoning of AI coding,” saying more code does not always mean better products. 

Product managers and designers are blending together 

Evans also predicted that traditional product and design jobs will start merging because AI can now speed up research, testing, and iteration. “The bottleneck of user research is gone,” Evans wrote, saying AI tools can now quickly analyse customer feedback and research data. 

At the same time, he argued that product managers should still experiment with code and prototypes, but should not directly push production code that engineers later have to review. 

Rise of ‘agent managers’ 

Another new role Evans highlighted was what he called “agent managers,” employees who automate their own work using AI systems and then manage those systems full-time. “Ironically, the people who automate their jobs with AI will always have a job,” he wrote.

Despite his strong advocacy toward automation, Evans said some parts of work should remain deeply human. For example, customer-facing roles. He said, direct conversations with customers should not disappear even as AI communication tools improve.

“In a world that will become saturated with AI communication, the human touch will matter more than anything to customers,” he wrote.

Disclaimer: This story is based on public statements made by Zeb Evans and reflects his views on AI, productivity, and the future of work at ClickUp.