When a project management software company reaches for artificial intelligence to explain why it is cutting staff, you know the phrase has become boilerplate. Monday.com is the latest name on a list that keeps getting longer. According to TechCrunch, which has been tracking the trend all year, the company joins more than twenty other major tech employers that announced significant layoffs in 2026 and named AI as a stated factor in the decision.
That number, twenty-plus and counting, is the real story here. Not any single round of cuts, but the speed at which “because of AI” has hardened into the default corporate explanation for a shrinking headcount. TechCrunch is maintaining the tally in reverse chronological order, which means the list reads like a ticker. Every few weeks, another logo drops in at the top.
The verb doing the heavy lifting is “blame”
Read the framing carefully and one word carries the weight: blame. TechCrunch did not write that these companies were transformed by AI or empowered by it. They blamed it. That choice of language captures something most quarterly earnings calls try to smooth over. When a company tells the market it is replacing workers with automation, it is making two claims at once. The first is technical, that software can now do the job. The second is narrative, that the layoff is a sign of progress rather than a sign of trouble.
Those two claims do not always travel together. A company under pressure to hit margin targets has every incentive to attach an ambitious, future-facing reason to a decision that might otherwise look like ordinary cost-cutting. “We over-hired during the boom” is an admission. “We are becoming an AI-first organization” is a strategy. Same spreadsheet, very different press release.
None of that means the technology is a fiction. Plenty of roles in customer support, content production, and routine engineering are genuinely being reshaped by tools that did not exist three years ago. But when the same explanation appears across twenty-one companies of wildly different sizes and business models, it starts to function less like a diagnosis and more like a script.
Why Monday.com landing on the list matters
Monday.com is worth pausing on because of what it sells. This is a company whose entire product is built around helping teams organize and automate their work. If any business is positioned to fold AI into its operations and mean it, this is the kind of one. So its appearance on a layoffs list carries a certain symbolism. The tools meant to make teams more productive are now cited, at least in part, as a reason those teams need fewer people.
That is the uncomfortable loop the industry has been circling for a while. Sell productivity software to enterprises, watch enterprises use productivity gains to justify cuts, then apply the same logic internally. Whether Monday.com’s decision was primarily about AI or primarily about the broader financial climate is something outsiders cannot fully verify from a single announcement. What we can see is the pattern it fits into.
What a running list actually tells us
A reverse chronological list is a particular kind of journalism. It does not argue a thesis so much as accumulate one. Each entry on its own could be explained away. Stacked together, in date order, they document a shift in how the industry talks about itself in 2026. The through-line is not that AI took twenty thousand jobs on a specific Tuesday. It is that AI has become the accepted vocabulary for describing why the jobs went away.
For workers, that vocabulary matters enormously. If a role is cut for financial reasons, the labor market might absorb it when conditions improve. If a role is declared obsolete by automation, the message is that it is not coming back. Those are different futures, and the language a company chooses helps decide which one employees are told to expect.
The healthy skepticism, then, is not “AI never cuts jobs.” It is “prove it.” When a company blames AI, the reasonable follow-up questions are which functions, replaced by which systems, and with what measurable result. Few announcements answer that. Most simply gesture at the technology and move on.
The list will keep growing, because the incentive to use the phrase has not gone anywhere. What to watch is whether investors, regulators, and the workers themselves start demanding evidence behind the word. The companies leaning hardest on the AI explanation may eventually have to show the automation actually exists. Until then, “we cut staff because of AI” tells you as much about corporate messaging in 2026 as it does about the technology.
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