Freelance gig board Fiverr is laying off 250 workers — a full 30 percent of its workforce — in a pivot to AI, months after the CEO exhorted workers to use AI to stay relevant.
It’s a pretty dickish move by CEO Micha Kaufman, who announced the reduction in staff in an X post last week, and also ironic: a company that helps people get freelance jobs that are increasingly endangered by AI is now laying off its actual employees due to AI.
“Sadly, AI will kill your freelancing business, too,” one critic wrote on X. “While [sic] hiring a freelancer when AI can do it much faster and cheaper?”
And where are the sacked Fiverr employees going to get work? On Fiverr? Well, good luck.
In his announcement, Kaufman explained that he wanted the company to become “AI-first” with a “smaller team, each with substantially greater productivity, and far fewer management layers,” echoing the thoughts of some business leaders on the future of the AI-powered workplace.
Back in April, Kaufman urged existing staff to start using AI or get left behind in the dust during this technological revolution, which has roiled the job markets and made entry-level positions for recent college graduates scarce.
Since the start of the year, some estimate that more than 10,000 jobs and counting have been lost due to businesses incorporating AI, with tech workers like those at Microsoft getting brutally slashed from the job axe.
Those cullings may look myopic in retrospect, because using AI hasn’t goosed profit margins in many companies and the technology is cannibalizing efforts to cultivate entry-level workers into the next generation of company leadership. But that’s longer-term thinking that clearly hasn’t penetrated the Fiverr C-suite offices.
Till then, people can express their displeasure at Kaufman on X, who’s been the target of pungent commentary since he made the lay off news.
“Thank you for liberating your employees from manual and tedious employment allowing them the freedom to be homeless like they always wanted,” one person wrote on X.
More on AI and jobs: If You’re Looking for a Job Right Now, AI Is Extremely Bad News