AI’s biggest proponents have argued for some time that the technology will usher in an era of unprecedented productivity gains, handsomely rewarding workers who take advantage of it and displacing those who don’t.
Zeb Evans, CEO of collaboration software startup ClickUp, says this change is imminent. Last Thursday, Evans announced in X that the company, which was last valued in 2021 at 4 billion dollarshad laid off 22% of its workforce, but characterized that reduction not as a cost-cutting measure, but rather as a radical adoption of AI that will propel the company to the next level.
“The majority of the savings from this change will flow directly to the people who stay. We will introduce salary bands in the millions of dollars. If you create a huge impact using AI, you will be paid outside of traditional bands,” Evans wrote.
ClickUp recently introduced approximately 3,000 internal AI agents to handle a wide range of complex tasks on behalf of its employees, according to a fortune article posted several days ago. Instead of performing the work themselves, staff members are now expected to direct these agents and ultimately review the output to ensure it meets company standards.
Evans’ goal, according to his post on X, is for AI to power ClickUp into a “100x organization.”
ClickUp is not alone in its hope that AI agents will provide massive productivity gains.
In fact, according to a recent Gartner survey, about 80% of companies using autonomous technology have cut jobs. However, the study found that workforce reductions they are not necessarily translating in significant financial returns.
While Gartner’s findings suggest that some companies are using unproven AI as an excuse to downsize, ClickUp maintains it is not one of them.
Evans told TechCrunch via email that the startup is seeing productivity gains thanks to AI agents. ClickUp is not only measuring those efficiencies internally, but is apparently also preparing to include them in an upcoming product for its customers.
“Instead of gamifying the cost of the tokens, we gamifying the value created and time saved,” Evans wrote.
In recent months, an increasing number of companies have begun monitoring employee token consumption, using it as a metric to see who is actually adopting AI tools. But critics argue That “tokenmaxxing,” as this concept is known, is the wrong metric because it simply accumulates spending on AI.
“People who automate their jobs with AI will always have jobs,” Evans said in his post. But if AI continues to take on more tasks, ClickUp will eventually need fewer and fewer people, eliminating those who fail to automate its functions well.
Technology circles have been theorizing about this scenario for a long time.
There is already an extreme example of a high-profile startup using AI automation to its fullest. Polsia, a year-old startup that claims to handle all software operations for individual entrepreneurs, is run by a single person: its founder and CEO, Ben Broca. This efficiency is apparently paying off: Poland just went up $30 million with a valuation of 250 million dollars.
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