What ClickUp’s mass layoff tells us about the future of work | TechCrunch
AI’s biggest champions have argued for some time that the technology will usher in an era of unprecedented productivity gains, richly rewarding workers who harness it while displacing those who don’t.
Zeb Evans, CEO of the collaboration software startup ClickUp, claims that this shift is imminent. Last Thursday, Evans announced on X that the company, which was last valued in 2021 at $4 billion, had laid off 22% of its workforce yet characterized that reduction as not a cost-cutting measure, but rather a radical embrace of AI that will propel the company to the next level.
“Most savings from this change will flow directly back into the people who stay. We’ll be introducing million-dollar salary bands. If you create outsized impact using AI, you’ll be paid outside of traditional bands,” Evans wrote.
ClickUp recently introduced roughly 3,000 internal AI agents to handle a wide range of complex tasks on behalf of its employees, according to a Fortune article published 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 the company’s standards.
Evans’s goal, according to his X post, is for AI to turbocharge ClickUp into a “100x org.”
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 tech have cut jobs. However, the study found that workforce reductions aren’t necessarily translating into meaningful financial returns.
While Gartner’s findings suggest some companies use unproven AI as an excuse to downsize, ClickUp maintains it is not one of them.
Evans told TechCrunch via email that the startup is indeed seeing productivity gains from AI agents. Not only is ClickUp measuring those efficiencies internally, but it’s also apparently gearing up to include them in a forthcoming product for its customers.
“Instead of gamifying token cost, we gamify value created and time saved,” Evans wrote.
In recent months, a growing number of companies have started 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 racks up AI expenses.
“The people that automate their jobs with AI will always have a job,” Evans claimed in his post. But if AI keeps taking over more tasks, ClickUp will eventually need fewer and fewer people, eliminating those who fail to automate their functions well.
Tech circles have long theorized about this scenario.
One extreme example of a high-profile startup using AI automation to the max already exists. Polsia, a one-year-old startup that claims to handle all software operations for solopreneurs, is run by just one person: its founder and CEO, Ben Broca. That efficiency is apparently paying off: Polsia just raised $30 million at a $250 million valuation.
AI’s biggest champions have argued for some time that the technology will usher in an era of unprecedented productivity gains, richly rewarding workers who harness it while displacing those who don’t.
Zeb Evans, CEO of the collaboration software startup ClickUp, claims that this shift is imminent. Last Thursday, Evans announced on X that the company, which was last valued in 2021 at $4 billion, had laid off 22% of its workforce yet characterized that reduction as not a cost-cutting measure, but rather a radical embrace of AI that will propel the company to the next level.
“Most savings from this change will flow directly back into the people who stay. We’ll be introducing million-dollar salary bands. If you create outsized impact using AI, you’ll be paid outside of traditional bands,” Evans wrote.
ClickUp recently introduced roughly 3,000 internal AI agents to handle a wide range of complex tasks on behalf of its employees, according to a Fortune article published 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 the company’s standards.
Evans’s goal, according to his X post, is for AI to turbocharge ClickUp into a “100x org.”
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 tech have cut jobs. However, the study found that workforce reductions aren’t necessarily translating into meaningful financial returns.
While Gartner’s findings suggest some companies use unproven AI as an excuse to downsize, ClickUp maintains it is not one of them.
Evans told TechCrunch via email that the startup is indeed seeing productivity gains from AI agents. Not only is ClickUp measuring those efficiencies internally, but it’s also apparently gearing up to include them in a forthcoming product for its customers.
“Instead of gamifying token cost, we gamify value created and time saved,” Evans wrote.
In recent months, a growing number of companies have started 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 racks up AI expenses.
“The people that automate their jobs with AI will always have a job,” Evans claimed in his post. But if AI keeps taking over more tasks, ClickUp will eventually need fewer and fewer people, eliminating those who fail to automate their functions well.
Tech circles have long theorized about this scenario.
One extreme example of a high-profile startup using AI automation to the max already exists. Polsia, a one-year-old startup that claims to handle all software operations for solopreneurs, is run by just one person: its founder and CEO, Ben Broca. That efficiency is apparently paying off: Polsia just raised $30 million at a $250 million valuation.
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#ClickUps #mass #layoff #tells #future #work #TechCrunchlayoff,ClickUp
![John Grisham’s New Legal Drama Is a Real Life Fight Against AI Audiobooks on YouTube
There’s an argument to be made that audiobooks are the finest form of content. You take a book—already off to a good start—and you get to have someone read it right into your ears. And when I say “someone” I mean the GOATs in the voice game. I could cite examples of celebrities you never knew narrated audiobooks, but here’s a sample of Werner Herzog narrating his memoir Every Man for Himself and God Against All that I think speaks for itself: [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4IQSvi3pXU[/embed] What could be better than this? Not only are audiobooks heaven, you can probably get all the audiobooks you want for free (and legally) by getting yourself a library card and using your local library’s preferred app (Libby, perhaps). I say all that, because given all the easy and free access to high quality audiobooks, why in the world would anyone listen to a John Grisham audiobook presented like this?
Don’t click that link. Instead of the actual audiobook, which is read wonderfully by Michael Beck, it will take you to a YouTube video consisting of an AI narrator reading Grisham’s recent hit novel the Widow, and the narration plays under 13 hours of AI slop video—simulated stock footage of fake vacations, basically. It looks like the video they display under the lyrics on Hell’s karaoke machine. I don’t have any science to back this up, but it will definitely give you brain cancer.
As the New York Times points out, 80,000 lost souls listened to the Widow this way. And Grisham is pissed about it. “The thieves and pirates who steal my work and try to profit from it, in any format, should be punished civilly and criminally […] And in this particular example, YouTube is complicit because it’s clear they know what is happening and refuse to stop it,” Grisham told the Times in an email. He should really write about this. YouTube, for its part, says the video is still up because there hasn’t been a takedown request, and that it doesn’t proactively police for copyright violations. “For more than two decades, we’ve built systems that help rights holders manage and control their copyrighted content — investing continuously to make sure those systems evolve as new threats emerge,” Jack Malon, a YouTube spokesperson, wrote to the Times.
If you’ve ever had a YouTube video flagged for a copyright violation, it may have been because of a feature called Content ID that music publishers absolutely love. It allows copyright holders to crawl YouTube and automatically detect copyrighted content. At times, Content ID has been a valuable moneymaking scheme for copyright holders, who were able to zero in on incidental—or even accidental—uses of copyrighted material, especially music, and by making a claim, monetize other people’s videos. It can’t do this anymore, but this is the sort of thing YouTube’s copyright system has been designed to support. As the Times points out, Content ID isn’t great at finding AI-narrated audiobooks. The audio waveform of the content is not the same as the audio the publisher owns, which makes it tricky to know what to even scan for. The author holds a copyright on the text, which can be slightly changed by the creator of the YouTube video while still leaving the book largely intact—good enough for casual listeners anyway. This leaves publishers and authors to navigate the takedown process manually, which seems, judging from the fact that the Widow is still up, to just not be happening.
That’s a pity. And I don’t mean because it’s robbing John Grisham of audiobook sales, which is bad, but not the gravest injustice in the universe. It’s bad because people are listening to such horrible garbage just because it’s available. And they really, truly, don’t have to. #John #Grishams #Legal #Drama #Real #Life #Fight #Audiobooks #YouTubeArtificial intelligence,Audiobooks,Books,intellectual proper](https://i2.wp.com/gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2026/05/john-grisham-1280x853.jpg?ssl=1 "John Grisham’s New Legal Drama Is a Real Life Fight Against AI Audiobooks on YouTube
There’s an argument to be made that audiobooks are the finest form of content. You take a book—already off to a good start—and you get to have someone read it right into your ears. And when I say “someone” I mean the GOATs in the voice game. I could cite examples of celebrities you never knew narrated audiobooks, but here’s a sample of Werner Herzog narrating his memoir Every Man for Himself and God Against All that I think speaks for itself: [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4IQSvi3pXU[/embed] What could be better than this? Not only are audiobooks heaven, you can probably get all the audiobooks you want for free (and legally) by getting yourself a library card and using your local library’s preferred app (Libby, perhaps). I say all that, because given all the easy and free access to high quality audiobooks, why in the world would anyone listen to a John Grisham audiobook presented like this?
Don’t click that link. Instead of the actual audiobook, which is read wonderfully by Michael Beck, it will take you to a YouTube video consisting of an AI narrator reading Grisham’s recent hit novel the Widow, and the narration plays under 13 hours of AI slop video—simulated stock footage of fake vacations, basically. It looks like the video they display under the lyrics on Hell’s karaoke machine. I don’t have any science to back this up, but it will definitely give you brain cancer.
As the New York Times points out, 80,000 lost souls listened to the Widow this way. And Grisham is pissed about it. “The thieves and pirates who steal my work and try to profit from it, in any format, should be punished civilly and criminally […] And in this particular example, YouTube is complicit because it’s clear they know what is happening and refuse to stop it,” Grisham told the Times in an email. He should really write about this. YouTube, for its part, says the video is still up because there hasn’t been a takedown request, and that it doesn’t proactively police for copyright violations. “For more than two decades, we’ve built systems that help rights holders manage and control their copyrighted content — investing continuously to make sure those systems evolve as new threats emerge,” Jack Malon, a YouTube spokesperson, wrote to the Times.
If you’ve ever had a YouTube video flagged for a copyright violation, it may have been because of a feature called Content ID that music publishers absolutely love. It allows copyright holders to crawl YouTube and automatically detect copyrighted content. At times, Content ID has been a valuable moneymaking scheme for copyright holders, who were able to zero in on incidental—or even accidental—uses of copyrighted material, especially music, and by making a claim, monetize other people’s videos. It can’t do this anymore, but this is the sort of thing YouTube’s copyright system has been designed to support. As the Times points out, Content ID isn’t great at finding AI-narrated audiobooks. The audio waveform of the content is not the same as the audio the publisher owns, which makes it tricky to know what to even scan for. The author holds a copyright on the text, which can be slightly changed by the creator of the YouTube video while still leaving the book largely intact—good enough for casual listeners anyway. This leaves publishers and authors to navigate the takedown process manually, which seems, judging from the fact that the Widow is still up, to just not be happening.
That’s a pity. And I don’t mean because it’s robbing John Grisham of audiobook sales, which is bad, but not the gravest injustice in the universe. It’s bad because people are listening to such horrible garbage just because it’s available. And they really, truly, don’t have to. #John #Grishams #Legal #Drama #Real #Life #Fight #Audiobooks #YouTubeArtificial intelligence,Audiobooks,Books,intellectual proper")
![John Grisham’s New Legal Drama Is a Real Life Fight Against AI Audiobooks on YouTube
There’s an argument to be made that audiobooks are the finest form of content. You take a book—already off to a good start—and you get to have someone read it right into your ears. And when I say “someone” I mean the GOATs in the voice game. I could cite examples of celebrities you never knew narrated audiobooks, but here’s a sample of Werner Herzog narrating his memoir Every Man for Himself and God Against All that I think speaks for itself: [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4IQSvi3pXU[/embed] What could be better than this? Not only are audiobooks heaven, you can probably get all the audiobooks you want for free (and legally) by getting yourself a library card and using your local library’s preferred app (Libby, perhaps). I say all that, because given all the easy and free access to high quality audiobooks, why in the world would anyone listen to a John Grisham audiobook presented like this?
Don’t click that link. Instead of the actual audiobook, which is read wonderfully by Michael Beck, it will take you to a YouTube video consisting of an AI narrator reading Grisham’s recent hit novel the Widow, and the narration plays under 13 hours of AI slop video—simulated stock footage of fake vacations, basically. It looks like the video they display under the lyrics on Hell’s karaoke machine. I don’t have any science to back this up, but it will definitely give you brain cancer.
As the New York Times points out, 80,000 lost souls listened to the Widow this way. And Grisham is pissed about it. “The thieves and pirates who steal my work and try to profit from it, in any format, should be punished civilly and criminally […] And in this particular example, YouTube is complicit because it’s clear they know what is happening and refuse to stop it,” Grisham told the Times in an email. He should really write about this. YouTube, for its part, says the video is still up because there hasn’t been a takedown request, and that it doesn’t proactively police for copyright violations. “For more than two decades, we’ve built systems that help rights holders manage and control their copyrighted content — investing continuously to make sure those systems evolve as new threats emerge,” Jack Malon, a YouTube spokesperson, wrote to the Times.
If you’ve ever had a YouTube video flagged for a copyright violation, it may have been because of a feature called Content ID that music publishers absolutely love. It allows copyright holders to crawl YouTube and automatically detect copyrighted content. At times, Content ID has been a valuable moneymaking scheme for copyright holders, who were able to zero in on incidental—or even accidental—uses of copyrighted material, especially music, and by making a claim, monetize other people’s videos. It can’t do this anymore, but this is the sort of thing YouTube’s copyright system has been designed to support. As the Times points out, Content ID isn’t great at finding AI-narrated audiobooks. The audio waveform of the content is not the same as the audio the publisher owns, which makes it tricky to know what to even scan for. The author holds a copyright on the text, which can be slightly changed by the creator of the YouTube video while still leaving the book largely intact—good enough for casual listeners anyway. This leaves publishers and authors to navigate the takedown process manually, which seems, judging from the fact that the Widow is still up, to just not be happening.
That’s a pity. And I don’t mean because it’s robbing John Grisham of audiobook sales, which is bad, but not the gravest injustice in the universe. It’s bad because people are listening to such horrible garbage just because it’s available. And they really, truly, don’t have to. #John #Grishams #Legal #Drama #Real #Life #Fight #Audiobooks #YouTubeArtificial intelligence,Audiobooks,Books,intellectual proper](https://gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2026/05/john-grisham-1280x853.jpg "John Grisham’s New Legal Drama Is a Real Life Fight Against AI Audiobooks on YouTube
There’s an argument to be made that audiobooks are the finest form of content. You take a book—already off to a good start—and you get to have someone read it right into your ears. And when I say “someone” I mean the GOATs in the voice game. I could cite examples of celebrities you never knew narrated audiobooks, but here’s a sample of Werner Herzog narrating his memoir Every Man for Himself and God Against All that I think speaks for itself: [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4IQSvi3pXU[/embed] What could be better than this? Not only are audiobooks heaven, you can probably get all the audiobooks you want for free (and legally) by getting yourself a library card and using your local library’s preferred app (Libby, perhaps). I say all that, because given all the easy and free access to high quality audiobooks, why in the world would anyone listen to a John Grisham audiobook presented like this?
Don’t click that link. Instead of the actual audiobook, which is read wonderfully by Michael Beck, it will take you to a YouTube video consisting of an AI narrator reading Grisham’s recent hit novel the Widow, and the narration plays under 13 hours of AI slop video—simulated stock footage of fake vacations, basically. It looks like the video they display under the lyrics on Hell’s karaoke machine. I don’t have any science to back this up, but it will definitely give you brain cancer.
As the New York Times points out, 80,000 lost souls listened to the Widow this way. And Grisham is pissed about it. “The thieves and pirates who steal my work and try to profit from it, in any format, should be punished civilly and criminally […] And in this particular example, YouTube is complicit because it’s clear they know what is happening and refuse to stop it,” Grisham told the Times in an email. He should really write about this. YouTube, for its part, says the video is still up because there hasn’t been a takedown request, and that it doesn’t proactively police for copyright violations. “For more than two decades, we’ve built systems that help rights holders manage and control their copyrighted content — investing continuously to make sure those systems evolve as new threats emerge,” Jack Malon, a YouTube spokesperson, wrote to the Times.
If you’ve ever had a YouTube video flagged for a copyright violation, it may have been because of a feature called Content ID that music publishers absolutely love. It allows copyright holders to crawl YouTube and automatically detect copyrighted content. At times, Content ID has been a valuable moneymaking scheme for copyright holders, who were able to zero in on incidental—or even accidental—uses of copyrighted material, especially music, and by making a claim, monetize other people’s videos. It can’t do this anymore, but this is the sort of thing YouTube’s copyright system has been designed to support. As the Times points out, Content ID isn’t great at finding AI-narrated audiobooks. The audio waveform of the content is not the same as the audio the publisher owns, which makes it tricky to know what to even scan for. The author holds a copyright on the text, which can be slightly changed by the creator of the YouTube video while still leaving the book largely intact—good enough for casual listeners anyway. This leaves publishers and authors to navigate the takedown process manually, which seems, judging from the fact that the Widow is still up, to just not be happening.
That’s a pity. And I don’t mean because it’s robbing John Grisham of audiobook sales, which is bad, but not the gravest injustice in the universe. It’s bad because people are listening to such horrible garbage just because it’s available. And they really, truly, don’t have to. #John #Grishams #Legal #Drama #Real #Life #Fight #Audiobooks #YouTubeArtificial intelligence,Audiobooks,Books,intellectual proper")
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