Fiverr CEO Micha Kaufman had told employees in May this year that AI was coming for their jobs. Four months later, his warning has come true.
Fiverr has laid off 30% of its workforce amid a push towards AI. The cuts will affect 250 employees, and are a part of a broader restructuring plan announced by CEO Micha Kaufman which involves doubling down on AI to automate systems and streamline operations. It’s not clear which sorts of roles will be impacted among Fiverr’s 762 employees.
“We are launching a transformation for Fiverr, to turn Fiverr into an AI-first company that’s leaner, faster, with a modern AI-focused tech infrastructure, a smaller team, each with substantially greater productivity, and far fewer management layers,” Kaufman said in a letter to employees. Fiverr said it does not expect the job cuts to materially impact business activities across the marketplace in the near term and plans to reinvest part of the savings in the business.
In May this year, Micha Kaufman had sent a letter to his employees, asking them to rapidly adapt and master AI tools or risk becoming obsolete in a matter of months. “Al is coming for your jobs. Heck, it’s coming for my job too. This is a wake-up call,” he had said in the letter. “It does not matter if you are a programmer, designer, product manager, data scientist, lawyer, customer support rep, salesperson, or a finance person – AI is coming for you,” he had added.
It appears that the day of reckoning has come, and Fiverr has become an AI-first company while simultaneously letting go of 30% of its workforce. It isn’t the only company to do down this path. Salesforce has said that it’s not hiring any new programmers this year because of efficiency gains from AI, and it has let go of 4,000 customer service representatives and replaced them with AI. Klarna too has let go of many customer service representatives, and Inmobi has indicated that AI will lead to job losses among its engineering staff. And with Fiverr too laying off 250 employees, it appears that AI-related job losses are only accelerating in the second half of the year.