It’s safe to say that the gaming handheld market in India is in its infancy. We don’t have the luxury of the brands the West or China enjoys, and after trying my hand at the Steam Deck on a recent foreign trip, it made me plenty sad. So, when rumors started circulating about a potential collaboration between Asus and Xbox to make a handheld, it got me really excited because the Taiwanese maker brings most of its products to India. And I was right, Asus recently introduced the regular Xbox Ally at a price of INR 69,990. For the money, you get a custom-built Ryzen Z2 A processor, 16GB LPDDR5 RAM, and 512GB internal storage.
I’ve read plenty of reviews from my tech journalist friends from the US, saying its price isn’t what an Xbox-branded console should cost. But the truth is, if you live anywhere outside North America—which a lot of us do—consoles aren’t really cheap. They cost significantly more, and when you factor in that other Windows handhelds cost the same, if not more, the regular ROG Xbox Ally becomes a solid option. Couple that with a fresh layer of custom Xbox software, and the console’s value becomes more apparent. But should you invest in one? To find out, I called Asus, got the Xbox Ally for review, and used it as my daily gaming machine while covering a series of events across the country.
Asus ROG Xbox Ally Review
Summary
The Asus ROG Xbox Ally is for the people who are frequently on the go, but still want to play the games they love. Its performance is really good, the FullHD 120Hz display is bright, the ergonomics and design are the best in business, and even the Xbox full-screen experience is a really good step in making Windows handhelds feel more like a console. Windows 11 also unlocks a whole new experience, transforming the Ally into a full PC that can be used for work and emulation.
ROG Xbox Ally: Specs
| Display | 7-inch FHD, 16:9, 120Hz refresh rate IPS panel |
| Dimensions | 11.5 x 4.8 x 2 inches |
| Weight | 670 g |
| CPU | AMD Ryzen Z2 A |
| RAM | 16GB LPDDR5 |
| Storage | 512GB SSD |
| Wireless connectivity | Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.4 |
| Ports | 2x USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type C, 1x microSD card reader, 1x 3.5mm audio jack |
| Price | $599/INR 69,990 |
Design & Hardware
Even though my experience with handhelds isn’t extensive, I do really like what Asus and Xbox have cooked up with the Ally. Make no mistake, the Ally is made of plastic, but it feels sturdy. There’s no chassis flex, and given my extensive travel with the device in my backpack without a carrying case, it can handle just about everything. The white color (exclusive to the regular Ally) is a real head-turner. I was constantly asked about it by strangers at the airport and while playing at a cafe. The only gripe I have about the white color is the fact that it gets dirty. Any crumbs you have on your fingers will automatically be applied to the Ally. So, don’t forget the cleaning cloth.
Too many handheld consoles chase that small and thin form factor and end up compromising on comfort, which is the backbone of any handheld experience. Fortunately, for the new Ally, the good news continues in the comfort department. The grips that Asus incorporated make it the most comfortable gaming handheld by a long shot. Sure, it does weigh more than the Steam Deck at 670 g, but everything feels thought out in the sense that all buttons are exactly where your fingers would naturally rest. And you don’t have to perform that awkward gymnastics with your fingers to reach anything.
On top, the regular Xbox Ally houses a couple of USB-C ports (both of which can be used for charging), an SD card reader, a headphone/microphone combo jack, volume controls, and a power button that doubles as the fingerprint scanner. The more expensive Ally X swaps out the regular USB-C ports for ones that support USB 4.
Controls & Haptics
Controls are what make or break any console experience. If you can’t control your in-game character, the whole experience falls off a cliff. Fortunately, the Xbox Ally doesn’t suffer from any of that. It’s essentially an Xbox controller attached to a display, in the sense that it contains two thumbsticks, ABXY buttons, a D-Pad, shoulder triggers, and a couple of extra buttons on the back. All of which gives the console a sense of familiarity. The thumbsticks, while not Hall Effect, are snappy and accurate and have held up well during my travels. The D-Pad buttons are clicky and responsive, and the ABXY buttons have tactile feedback. The shoulder triggers are Hall Effect and are plenty accurate, which translates to a really nice gaming experience.
The couple of extra paddles on the back can be customized using the Armoury Crate app. The app also lets you remap regular buttons. To make the experience more immersive, the Ally includes haptics that sync with the game and provide rumble. While I wouldn’t call it the most impressive haptic motor, certainly not to the level of PS5’s controllers, they do a decent job of improving the overall gaming experience. Beyond that, I was hugely impressed by the speakers, which pack a real punch in terms of bass and provide a really decent multimedia experience.
Display
One thing that Asus hasn’t changed from the previous Ally is the display, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad. You still get the same 7-inch Full HD IPS panel that supports a variable refresh rate of up to 120Hz. While I’d have loved to see an OLED panel, the glossy IPS keeps color looking pretty for the most part. I measured 96% coverage of the sRGB color space, while DCI-P3 numbers were around 74%. Since nobody is editing videos on a display like this, the coverage is pretty decent. Unfortunately, as a consequence of the glossy texture, the panel is very prone to fingerprints, so you’ll be carrying a microfiber cloth everywhere.
When I first started using the ROG Ally in brighter environments, the brightness seemed a bit off. Like the panel wasn’t bright enough. Fortunately, I soon discovered that a Windows setting that dims brightness on battery power was enabled. After disabling it, the experience was a lot better. I measured a peak brightness of over 450 nits, which is really decent but just about gaming everywhere. The variable refresh rate also pays huge dividends in certain games, and I didn’t experience any tearing.
Software & Performance
The first question I had when Asus unveiled its collaboration with Xbox was how they did it. How can they prevent Windows from creeping with its unnecessary fluff and ruining the console experience? And did they succeed? Well, the answer is both yes and no. The Xbox Full Screen Experience is what drives everything. It’s the main selling point of the Xbox Ally, and I love it. When you power up the device, it boots directly into the Xbox launcher, so you don’t have to deal with Windows. Since the OS is very resource-hungry, which is super precious on a handheld, the launcher also restricts any Windows activity.
Sure, you can switch to Windows mode with a single button press, but if you don’t want it, Windows will never appear. And that’s what every other Windows handheld lacks. Clicking the Xbox button on the console brings up a neat menu of all your games (even the ones installed from third-party launchers), along with settings to adjust sound and brightness, an Xbox Social menu to invite friends, and the Gaming Copilot. Beyond that, there’s also an Armoury Crate tab that handles all the performance metrics. You can cycle between the different performance modes, enable game overlay of the stats, change resolution, set frame limiter, and a lot more. My point is that everything is thought about.
Windows is still Windows
Like a coin, there’s another side to this story as well. The Xbox gaming experience isn’t perfect. Games sometimes don’t recognize the controls and instead display keyboard options. While clicking the Xbox button did solve this problem, it’s not what comes to mind first. You might know how to do it, but someone who hasn’t played around with PCs before might not. I also ran into a unique issue: even after buying Xbox Game Pass, I couldn’t access EA games. Typically, EA games are included in Game Pass, but for some reason, it took a week for the EA Play app to recognize that I have the subscription. Beyond that, if you open the Windows version and then launch the Xbox launcher, you’ll need to restart the device to achieve optimal performance. Otherwise, Windows will continue to run in the background.
As much as I’ve ranted about Windows, it has its perks. For starters, it unlocks a whole world of games, including emulation, which would work amazingly with the controls. Plus, the Ally can be a PC, too. Just connect it with a monitor, and voila, your handheld is a workstation capable of handling any everyday task. Speaking of being a PC, I also ran a series of benchmarks to see where the new AMD Ryzen Z2 A stands. The Ally scored 1,171 in Geekbench’s single-core test and 4,398 in the multi-core test, putting it right on par with the likes of the Steam Deck OLED.
How Does It Game?
Time to address the elephant in the room, and perhaps the only reason anyone would buy a device like this: gaming. The Ally houses the AMD Ryzen Z2 A processor, coupled with integrated RDNA 2 architecture graphics. And the performance will ultimately depend on the type of games you play. I tried pretty much the entire library there is. In demanding titles like Cyberpunk and Starfield, you’ll ideally be running the game at 720p, with low to medium settings. In Cyberpunk 2077, the Ally managed to push to around 40 fps, while Starfield was above the 30 fps threshold. I also tried AMD’s FSR 2.1, and there was a noticeable increase in the frames. Though some people don’t like these generated frames, so your mileage may vary.
Being more sensible and turning over to titles like GTA 5 Enhanced Edition, I had a lot more fun. The graphics settings were set to medium/high, and I easily got over 40 fps, sometimes even 60 fps, while playing online. The good news continues with titles like Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Forza Motorsport, F1 2024, and Injustice, where, once again, the Ally easily managed to hit the sweet spot of 40-45 FPS on medium settings. It’s possible to get up to 60 fps with the console, but I prefer more detail. In lighter titles like Real Cricket and Rematch, the frame rates were always over 60.
Since the Ally is an Xbox console, you can also stream games. Streaming capabilities are included with the premium tier of Game Pass. I compared my GTA Online experience between the two, and given the strong internet connection, it was really decent. Of course, you obviously can’t expect to play first-person shooters, but for story games, it’s fine.
Battery Life
One of the big differentiators between the regular Ally and the Ally X, apart from the processor, is the battery. The normal Ally houses a 60W cell, while the X gets a beefier 80W battery. In retrospect, the Ally’s battery life is about what you’d expect. When running GTA V online from 100%, the console lasted me about 2 and a half hours before shutting down.
It is important to note that the brightness was set to maximum and the performance mode was Turbo (the highest tier). Turning the brightness and performance modes down a notch helped me cross that 3-hour threshold. Charging is handled by a 65W fast charger that can fully charge the battery from 0% to 100% in just over an hour.
Verdict
At INR 69,990, the ROG Xbox Ally is certainly a niche product. It’s for people who are frequently on the go, but still want to play the games they love. And luckily, that happens to be me. As a tech journalist, I travel regularly, which means long waits at airports, and for those times, the Ally proved to be a lifesaver. Its performance is really good, the FullHD 120Hz display is bright, the ergonomics and design are the best in business, and even the Xbox full-screen experience is a really good step in making Windows handhelds feel more like a console. Windows 11 also unlocks a whole new experience, transforming the Ally into a full PC that can be used for work and emulation.
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![Monday.com is the latest tech company to blame AI for layoffs — here are 20 others | TechCrunch
Monday.com, the Tel Aviv-based work management software company known for its colorful, customizable project-tracking boards, this week became the latest tech company to cite AI as a factor in job cuts. On Wednesday, the company said in an SEC filing that it will lay off about 20% of its workforce, or just over 600 employees, as part of a “restructuring plan” tied to its “ongoing transformation of its product, marketing, and go-to-market strategy” in support of “a leaner, more focused operating model” as it continues investing in its “AI-driven growth strategy.”
Co-founder Eran Zinman told employees in a LinkedIn memo that the move “was not made to reduce costs or replace people with AI,” positioning it instead as adapting the organization to a new AI-first vision the company laid out roughly a year ago when it rebranded around a platform-wide AI push. Monday.com, which has two offices in the U.S., expects million to million in net restructuring charges but still projects up to 20% year-over-year revenue growth for 2026.
So far, according to new Financial Times analysis, U.S. tech companies have slashed nearly 140,000 jobs since the start of this year, with Amazon, Oracle, Meta, and Microsoft alone accounting for almost 50,000 of those cuts as they funnel hundreds of billions of dollars into AI data center buildouts. Interestingly, the FT also found that companies citing AI as a factor in job cuts have underperformed the Nasdaq by almost 10% in the 30 trading days following their announcements, suggesting the market doesn’t entirely buy the stories that the companies are telling.
Still, the picture isn’t uniformly bleak. The FT notes that AI-focused companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are hiring rapidly, absorbing some of the talent shed elsewhere in the industry. And within some of the very companies making cuts, headcount is shifting rather than disappearing entirely. Meta, for instance, earlier this year moved roughly 7,000 employees into new AI-focused roles even as it laid off 8,000 others, and IBM says it’s tripling entry-level hiring for AI and hybrid-cloud roles alongside recent cuts.
Below is a running look — in reverse chronological order — at the bigger tech companies that have announced significant layoffs this year with AI as a stated factor.
Microsoft — July 9, 2026. Microsoft cut about 4,800 roles, or 2.1% of its global workforce, most of them in its Xbox gaming unit, resetting the business only three years after acquiring Activision Blizzard for billion, per the FT. Separately, it offered buyouts structured as voluntary separations, without disclosing how many employees these would impact. The company said the role eliminations were “not being replaced by AI” but acknowledged “AI is changing how work gets done.” CFO Amy Hood said total headcount declined year-over-year in fiscal Q3, and was expected to keep declining as the company focuses on “building high-performing teams that operate with pace and agility” amid rising AI investment.
Oracle — June 22, 2026. Oracle disclosed in late June that it had reduced its workforce by 21,000 employees over the past 12 months, a decline of 13%, which means more cuts than was previously known, including because of AI. “The adoption and deployment of AI technologies across our operations have resulted, and may continue to result, in reductions to our workforce,” the company said in an annual financial regulatory filing.
GitLab — June 3, 2026. GitLab laid off roughly 350 workers, about 14% of its staff, to fund AI infrastructure investment and handle surging traffic from AI workflows. CEO Bill Staples said agentic workloads are “pushing competitors to the brink” and that the company had begun a “generational rebuild” of its core infrastructure to support what he called 100x growth requirements. GitLab is exiting 22 countries, flattening management layers, and partnering with an unspecified AI lab to rebuild its platform for agent-scale workloads. The company reported first-quarter revenue of 4 million, up 23% year-over-year, and expects to incur to million in restructuring costs.
Google — ongoing through May. Alphabet’s Google has quietly cut employees across its Cloud division, including its Threat Intelligence Group and Mandiant-linked cybersecurity staff, even as Cloud revenue grew 63% to exceed billion for the first time and its backlog nearly doubled to over 0 billion. Over the past year, Google has cut more than a third of the managers overseeing small teams — 35% fewer managers with fewer direct reports. Unlike most companies on this list, Google has never announced a single overall number — the cuts have come through a rolling performance review process, a voluntary buyout program, and structural reorganizations, with outside estimates putting the 2026 total at between 1,500 and 3,000+ engineers.
Intuit — May 20, 2026. Intuit announced plans to eliminate roughly 3,000 jobs — about 17% of its total workforce — in a restructuring centered on reducing complexity and reallocating resources toward AI. CEO Sasan Goodarzi reportedly told staff the company is reducing complexity and simplifying the structure so it can deliver better products.
Meta — May 20-21, 2026. Meta laid off about 8,000 employees, roughly 10% of its workforce, while moving about 7,000 employees into new AI-focused roles (that they reportedly hate). CEO Mark Zuckerberg told staff the cuts were necessary because “success isn’t a given” in AI.
Cisco — May 14, 2026. Cisco announced it’s cutting nearly 4,000 jobs, about 5% of its workforce, despite reporting better-than-expected profit and revenue. CFO Mark Patterson said: “This was really not a savings-driven restructure… this is more [about] realigning … resources around silicon, optics, security and AI.”
Cloudflare — May 7-8, 2026. Cloudflare cut about 20% of its workforce (1,100 people), reporting quarterly revenue of 9.8 million, up 34% year-over-year and the highest single quarter in company history. CEO Matthew Prince wrote that “the vast majority of those we laid off last week were measurers” — middle management, finance, legal, internal auditing, and revenue recognition.
General Motors — May 12, 2026. GM eliminated 500 to 600 jobs, largely in IT roles in Austin, Texas, and Warren, Michigan, saying it was reevaluating its workforce needs amid uncertain market conditions. A person familiar with the cuts told CNBC that AI played a role in the decision but that it wasn’t the only reason. GM’s statement said it was “transforming its Information Technology organization to better position the company for the future.” Despite the cuts, the company still had roughly 80 open IT positions, including roles in AI, motorsports, and autonomous vehicles.
Coinbase — May 5, 2026. The crypto exchange said it was cutting about 700 employees, or 14% of its staff, as part of a restructuring aimed at addressing market volatility and increasing AI efficiency. The company flattened its organizational structure to five layers below the CEO and COO, and said it would experiment with “one-person teams” combining engineering, design, and product roles. CEO Brian Armstrong wrote that AI had changed the pace of work dramatically — “engineers use AI to ship in days what used to take a team weeks” — and that the company needed to “leverage AI across every facet of our jobs.”
PayPal — May 5, 2026. PayPal announced plans to cut around 20% of its workforce over the next two to three years — north of 4,500 jobs — as part of a turnaround strategy centered on AI adoption and organizational simplification. CEO Enrique Lores told investors the company would “aggressively adopt AI” in its development processes and formed a new “AI transformation and simplification” team reporting directly to him, tasked with redesigning the company’s processes “function by function.” Lores framed the cuts as removing organizational layers, and said AI would extend well beyond coding into customer service, support operations, and risk management.Microsoft — April-May 2026. Microsoft offered buyouts structured as voluntary separations, without disclosing how many employees these would impact. CFO Amy Hood said total headcount declined year-over-year in fiscal Q3, and is expected to keep declining as the company focuses on “building high-performing teams that operate with pace and agility” amid rising AI investment.
Snap — April 16, 2026. Snap cut roughly 16% of its global workforce — about 1,000 full-time employees — and closed more than 300 open roles, with CEO Evan Spiegel citing AI advancements as a key driver. “Rapid advancements in artificial intelligence enable our teams to reduce repetitive work, increase velocity, and better support our community, partners, and advertisers,” Spiegel wrote in a memo filed with the SEC. The company said it had already seen small squads using AI tools to drive progress across Snapchat+, ad platform performance, and infrastructure efficiency.
IBM — rolling through 2026. Between Q4 2025 cuts and April 2026 Red Hat engineering reductions, estimates range from 3,000 to 9,000 U.S. positions eliminated, bringing IBM’s cumulative total since September 2024 above 15,000. Bloomberg reported IBM plans to triple its U.S. entry-level hiring for AI and hybrid-cloud roles, even as roughly 200 HR positions were replaced by AI agents. An IBM spokesperson described the Q4 2025 round as a routine rebalancing affecting “a low single-digit percentage” of its global workforce.
Atlassian — March 11, 2026. Atlassian cut about 1,600 jobs (10% of its workforce) to “rebalance” toward AI and enterprise sales, even as shares rose nearly 2% on the news. CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes said: “Our approach is not ‘AI replaces people.’ But it would be disingenuous to pretend AI doesn’t change the mix of skills we need or the number of roles required in certain areas. It does.” Dell — January 30 (though disclosed in March 2026). Dell’s total workforce fell about 10% in fiscal 2026 — roughly 11,000 jobs — to about 97,000 employees from 108,000 a year earlier, with 9 million spent on severance. The cuts came as Dell projected its AI-optimized server revenue could double in fiscal 2027.
Oracle — March 5-31, 2026. As noted above, Oracle began telling employees it would be cutting thousands of jobs via terminal emails. The cuts came even as Oracle posted .7 billion in quarterly net income, up 27% year-over-year, with remaining performance obligations up 325% to 3 billion — savings redirected toward AI data centers. The cuts that would later total 21,000 over 12 months, as Oracle disclosed in its June 22 annual filing.
Block — February 26-27, 2026. Jack Dorsey’s Block cut 4,000 jobs — nearly half its workforce, down to under 6,000 from over 10,000. Dorsey wrote on X: “We’re already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company.” He added: “I think most companies are late. Within the next year, I believe the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion and make similar structural changes.” Salesforce — February 10, 2026. Salesforce laid off fewer than 1,000 employees across marketing, product management, data analytics, and its Agentforce AI unit. The company told Fortune, “Because of the benefits and efficiencies of Agentforce, we’ve seen the number of support cases we handle decline and we no longer need to actively backfill support engineer roles.” This followed an earlier cut of about 4,000 customer-support roles, shrinking that team from roughly 9,000 to 5,000, with CEO Marc Benioff saying the company needed “less heads” because AI agents handle the work. Amazon — January 28, 2026. Amazon cut 16,000 corporate jobs, following 14,000 cuts in October 2025 — about 9% of its corporate workforce in three months. The company said it was part of “strengthen[ing] our organization by reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy.” CEO Andy Jassy had said in June 2025 that, “As we roll out more generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done. We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today… in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company.”
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.#Monday.com #latest #tech #company #blame #layoffs #TechCrunchAI,Layoffs](https://i2.wp.com/techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/robot-at-desk.png?resize=1200%2C800&ssl=1 "Monday.com is the latest tech company to blame AI for layoffs — here are 20 others | TechCrunch
Monday.com, the Tel Aviv-based work management software company known for its colorful, customizable project-tracking boards, this week became the latest tech company to cite AI as a factor in job cuts. On Wednesday, the company said in an SEC filing that it will lay off about 20% of its workforce, or just over 600 employees, as part of a “restructuring plan” tied to its “ongoing transformation of its product, marketing, and go-to-market strategy” in support of “a leaner, more focused operating model” as it continues investing in its “AI-driven growth strategy.”
Co-founder Eran Zinman told employees in a LinkedIn memo that the move “was not made to reduce costs or replace people with AI,” positioning it instead as adapting the organization to a new AI-first vision the company laid out roughly a year ago when it rebranded around a platform-wide AI push. Monday.com, which has two offices in the U.S., expects million to million in net restructuring charges but still projects up to 20% year-over-year revenue growth for 2026.
So far, according to new Financial Times analysis, U.S. tech companies have slashed nearly 140,000 jobs since the start of this year, with Amazon, Oracle, Meta, and Microsoft alone accounting for almost 50,000 of those cuts as they funnel hundreds of billions of dollars into AI data center buildouts. Interestingly, the FT also found that companies citing AI as a factor in job cuts have underperformed the Nasdaq by almost 10% in the 30 trading days following their announcements, suggesting the market doesn’t entirely buy the stories that the companies are telling.
Still, the picture isn’t uniformly bleak. The FT notes that AI-focused companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are hiring rapidly, absorbing some of the talent shed elsewhere in the industry. And within some of the very companies making cuts, headcount is shifting rather than disappearing entirely. Meta, for instance, earlier this year moved roughly 7,000 employees into new AI-focused roles even as it laid off 8,000 others, and IBM says it’s tripling entry-level hiring for AI and hybrid-cloud roles alongside recent cuts.
Below is a running look — in reverse chronological order — at the bigger tech companies that have announced significant layoffs this year with AI as a stated factor.
Microsoft — July 9, 2026. Microsoft cut about 4,800 roles, or 2.1% of its global workforce, most of them in its Xbox gaming unit, resetting the business only three years after acquiring Activision Blizzard for billion, per the FT. Separately, it offered buyouts structured as voluntary separations, without disclosing how many employees these would impact. The company said the role eliminations were “not being replaced by AI” but acknowledged “AI is changing how work gets done.” CFO Amy Hood said total headcount declined year-over-year in fiscal Q3, and was expected to keep declining as the company focuses on “building high-performing teams that operate with pace and agility” amid rising AI investment.
Oracle — June 22, 2026. Oracle disclosed in late June that it had reduced its workforce by 21,000 employees over the past 12 months, a decline of 13%, which means more cuts than was previously known, including because of AI. “The adoption and deployment of AI technologies across our operations have resulted, and may continue to result, in reductions to our workforce,” the company said in an annual financial regulatory filing.
GitLab — June 3, 2026. GitLab laid off roughly 350 workers, about 14% of its staff, to fund AI infrastructure investment and handle surging traffic from AI workflows. CEO Bill Staples said agentic workloads are “pushing competitors to the brink” and that the company had begun a “generational rebuild” of its core infrastructure to support what he called 100x growth requirements. GitLab is exiting 22 countries, flattening management layers, and partnering with an unspecified AI lab to rebuild its platform for agent-scale workloads. The company reported first-quarter revenue of 4 million, up 23% year-over-year, and expects to incur to million in restructuring costs.
Google — ongoing through May. Alphabet’s Google has quietly cut employees across its Cloud division, including its Threat Intelligence Group and Mandiant-linked cybersecurity staff, even as Cloud revenue grew 63% to exceed billion for the first time and its backlog nearly doubled to over 0 billion. Over the past year, Google has cut more than a third of the managers overseeing small teams — 35% fewer managers with fewer direct reports. Unlike most companies on this list, Google has never announced a single overall number — the cuts have come through a rolling performance review process, a voluntary buyout program, and structural reorganizations, with outside estimates putting the 2026 total at between 1,500 and 3,000+ engineers.
Intuit — May 20, 2026. Intuit announced plans to eliminate roughly 3,000 jobs — about 17% of its total workforce — in a restructuring centered on reducing complexity and reallocating resources toward AI. CEO Sasan Goodarzi reportedly told staff the company is reducing complexity and simplifying the structure so it can deliver better products.
Meta — May 20-21, 2026. Meta laid off about 8,000 employees, roughly 10% of its workforce, while moving about 7,000 employees into new AI-focused roles (that they reportedly hate). CEO Mark Zuckerberg told staff the cuts were necessary because “success isn’t a given” in AI.
Cisco — May 14, 2026. Cisco announced it’s cutting nearly 4,000 jobs, about 5% of its workforce, despite reporting better-than-expected profit and revenue. CFO Mark Patterson said: “This was really not a savings-driven restructure… this is more [about] realigning … resources around silicon, optics, security and AI.”
Cloudflare — May 7-8, 2026. Cloudflare cut about 20% of its workforce (1,100 people), reporting quarterly revenue of 9.8 million, up 34% year-over-year and the highest single quarter in company history. CEO Matthew Prince wrote that “the vast majority of those we laid off last week were measurers” — middle management, finance, legal, internal auditing, and revenue recognition.
General Motors — May 12, 2026. GM eliminated 500 to 600 jobs, largely in IT roles in Austin, Texas, and Warren, Michigan, saying it was reevaluating its workforce needs amid uncertain market conditions. A person familiar with the cuts told CNBC that AI played a role in the decision but that it wasn’t the only reason. GM’s statement said it was “transforming its Information Technology organization to better position the company for the future.” Despite the cuts, the company still had roughly 80 open IT positions, including roles in AI, motorsports, and autonomous vehicles.
Coinbase — May 5, 2026. The crypto exchange said it was cutting about 700 employees, or 14% of its staff, as part of a restructuring aimed at addressing market volatility and increasing AI efficiency. The company flattened its organizational structure to five layers below the CEO and COO, and said it would experiment with “one-person teams” combining engineering, design, and product roles. CEO Brian Armstrong wrote that AI had changed the pace of work dramatically — “engineers use AI to ship in days what used to take a team weeks” — and that the company needed to “leverage AI across every facet of our jobs.”
PayPal — May 5, 2026. PayPal announced plans to cut around 20% of its workforce over the next two to three years — north of 4,500 jobs — as part of a turnaround strategy centered on AI adoption and organizational simplification. CEO Enrique Lores told investors the company would “aggressively adopt AI” in its development processes and formed a new “AI transformation and simplification” team reporting directly to him, tasked with redesigning the company’s processes “function by function.” Lores framed the cuts as removing organizational layers, and said AI would extend well beyond coding into customer service, support operations, and risk management.Microsoft — April-May 2026. Microsoft offered buyouts structured as voluntary separations, without disclosing how many employees these would impact. CFO Amy Hood said total headcount declined year-over-year in fiscal Q3, and is expected to keep declining as the company focuses on “building high-performing teams that operate with pace and agility” amid rising AI investment.
Snap — April 16, 2026. Snap cut roughly 16% of its global workforce — about 1,000 full-time employees — and closed more than 300 open roles, with CEO Evan Spiegel citing AI advancements as a key driver. “Rapid advancements in artificial intelligence enable our teams to reduce repetitive work, increase velocity, and better support our community, partners, and advertisers,” Spiegel wrote in a memo filed with the SEC. The company said it had already seen small squads using AI tools to drive progress across Snapchat+, ad platform performance, and infrastructure efficiency.
IBM — rolling through 2026. Between Q4 2025 cuts and April 2026 Red Hat engineering reductions, estimates range from 3,000 to 9,000 U.S. positions eliminated, bringing IBM’s cumulative total since September 2024 above 15,000. Bloomberg reported IBM plans to triple its U.S. entry-level hiring for AI and hybrid-cloud roles, even as roughly 200 HR positions were replaced by AI agents. An IBM spokesperson described the Q4 2025 round as a routine rebalancing affecting “a low single-digit percentage” of its global workforce.
Atlassian — March 11, 2026. Atlassian cut about 1,600 jobs (10% of its workforce) to “rebalance” toward AI and enterprise sales, even as shares rose nearly 2% on the news. CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes said: “Our approach is not ‘AI replaces people.’ But it would be disingenuous to pretend AI doesn’t change the mix of skills we need or the number of roles required in certain areas. It does.” Dell — January 30 (though disclosed in March 2026). Dell’s total workforce fell about 10% in fiscal 2026 — roughly 11,000 jobs — to about 97,000 employees from 108,000 a year earlier, with 9 million spent on severance. The cuts came as Dell projected its AI-optimized server revenue could double in fiscal 2027.
Oracle — March 5-31, 2026. As noted above, Oracle began telling employees it would be cutting thousands of jobs via terminal emails. The cuts came even as Oracle posted .7 billion in quarterly net income, up 27% year-over-year, with remaining performance obligations up 325% to 3 billion — savings redirected toward AI data centers. The cuts that would later total 21,000 over 12 months, as Oracle disclosed in its June 22 annual filing.
Block — February 26-27, 2026. Jack Dorsey’s Block cut 4,000 jobs — nearly half its workforce, down to under 6,000 from over 10,000. Dorsey wrote on X: “We’re already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company.” He added: “I think most companies are late. Within the next year, I believe the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion and make similar structural changes.” Salesforce — February 10, 2026. Salesforce laid off fewer than 1,000 employees across marketing, product management, data analytics, and its Agentforce AI unit. The company told Fortune, “Because of the benefits and efficiencies of Agentforce, we’ve seen the number of support cases we handle decline and we no longer need to actively backfill support engineer roles.” This followed an earlier cut of about 4,000 customer-support roles, shrinking that team from roughly 9,000 to 5,000, with CEO Marc Benioff saying the company needed “less heads” because AI agents handle the work. Amazon — January 28, 2026. Amazon cut 16,000 corporate jobs, following 14,000 cuts in October 2025 — about 9% of its corporate workforce in three months. The company said it was part of “strengthen[ing] our organization by reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy.” CEO Andy Jassy had said in June 2025 that, “As we roll out more generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done. We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today… in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company.”
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