The AI jobs apocalypse that Sam Altman is glad isn’t happening continues not to happen. The latest company to lay off a large portion of employees is Wix, which is cutting 20% of its workforce while citing the “fast evolution” of AI.
CEO Avishai Abrahami wrote on X that reducing the Wix team by 20%, or around 1,000 people, was a “hard decision” (four times).
Abrahami said the first reason why the website builder is cutting staff is the exchange rate between the Israeli shekel and the US dollar. He said the shekel has strengthened against the dollar in recent quarters, creating a “structural pressure” on Wix’s ability to operate at scale.
Then there’s the very familiar second reason: “the fast evolution of AI capabilities.” Abrahami writes that “we have witnessed the most significant shift in how companies are built since the invention of modern programming languages in the 1970s.”
“This is not just about adopting new tools – it is about rewiring how companies are built, how they think, how they manage and how they operate. Companies that embrace this change will not only build faster; they will build things the previous generation literally could not have imagined.”
The CEO goes on to talk about the need to become a faster, leaner, flatter organization due to AI, with fewer layers between leadership and team members. Then there are the usual lines about needing to evolve in order to compete, we had no choice, etc.
This sort of CEO message has become a depressingly common sight in the AI age. Abrahami’s post is very similar to the one Jack Dorsey wrote when Block laid off over 4,000 people earlier this year. The former Twitter boss said it was better to get rid of everyone at once rather than lay people off slowly over the coming months and years as automation took their jobs.
Wix’s mass layoffs come just days after OpenAI boss Altman gushed about how excited he was that the AI jobs apocalypse he predicted last year had not come to pass. There have been almost 116,000 layoffs in the tech world so far in 2026, quickly approaching the 124,000 that we saw for the entirety of 2025. A massive percentage of these cuts are tied to AI, either through direct job replacement or companies’ resources being redirected toward AI infrastructure.
Altman’s view that things could always be worse might fade away in the coming years. A recent survey of almost 1,000 executives found that 99% said they expect to make some reduction in headcount in the next 24 months.
The irony in all this is that companies spending millions and billions on AI still aren’t seeing any meaningful returns. A survey in January found more than half the participating CEOs said AI adoption had not increased revenue or reduced costs, something Uber is all too familiar with.
Source: Techspot
https://www.techspot.com/news/112573-wix-lays-off-1000-workers-ai-jobs-apocalypse.html
