Monday’s AI makeover is pushing managers toward the exit
Five senior executives are leaving as the software company reshapes its organization and seeks to cut management layers. The restructuring comes as monday.com tries to convince investors that its AI strategy can reverse a 37% share-price decline this year.
The local job market is being flooded with résumés from monday.com employees. The trend involves not only the 350 staff members laid off this summer as part of a sweeping 20% workforce reduction, but also employees leaving the software company voluntarily. As Calcalist reported over the weekend, five senior executives are currently leaving the company, and the departures may not end there.
According to information obtained by Calcalist, Orly Stern Izhaki, VP, AI Work Platform; Sergei Liakhovetsky, VP of R&D; and Seetvon Amir, VP of Product, are expected to leave the company within the next month. Lior Zagury, Senior Director, Global IT & Workforce Technology, who has been with monday.com for six years, is also expected to depart at the end of October. These departures follow the exit of Liron Shtraichman, a VP of R&D, last month.
According to sources close to monday.com, the prevailing sentiment inside the company, which is reorganizing amid the upheaval caused by AI, is that a substantial layer of management has become redundant. While monday.com is not planning another formal round of layoffs, the company is seeking to encourage employees, particularly middle managers, to resign voluntarily. In many cases, it is not initiating terminations directly but is effectively steering managers toward the exit. Some have been left with smaller teams that no longer justify a dedicated management role, while others have found that their areas of responsibility are no longer central to the company’s operations. Whereas monday.com might previously have tried to retain employees who expressed a desire to leave, it is now more willing to let them go.
The rationale behind this quiet shift is to flatten an organizational structure that expanded during the rapid growth phase following the company’s 2021 IPO and eliminate a layer of management. The result is that more employees report directly to vice presidents, including the chief technology officer.
Meanwhile, monday.com’s website and LinkedIn page list dozens of open positions, including in Tel Aviv, and the company is actively recruiting for them. The roles point to an effort to reinvent monday.com as an AI-focused company. Although it has announced a series of initiatives around an AI agent platform designed to manage organizational workflows, investors remain unconvinced. The stock is down 37% since the beginning of 2026.
Monday.com has become a prominent symbol of the so-called “SaaS apocalypse,” the fear that AI could render existing software obsolete and undermine the subscription-based business model. Over the past six months, anxiety across the software sector has begun to ease, giving way to a more nuanced assessment of which companies are best positioned to withstand the shift. A growing concern is that some software providers may have less differentiated technology, and therefore less to offer customers, in an AI-driven market.
Monday.com’s market value is currently at around $3.8 billion. Several software companies have staged recoveries over recent months, even if their shares have yet to return to previous peaks. Monday.com, like Israeli internet company Wix, has been left behind. Shares of Atlassian, one of monday.com’s main competitors, are up more than 30% since the beginning of 2026.
Reinventing a company while it is publicly traded is a difficult undertaking, and the challenge is likely to be reflected in monday.com’s financial results, due in three weeks. In addition to the substantial severance costs associated with its layoffs, the company is likely to face high development expenses as it invests in its AI transformation. This is only the beginning.
The positions monday.com is seeking to fill offer a glimpse of the skills it needs. The company is looking for people with AI expertise, particularly in product and development, as well as “Forward Deployed Engineers.” These specialists work directly with customers to help them deploy and use monday.com’s AI solutions. Hiring them is likely to be expensive. The Israeli labor market has a limited supply of professionals with this combination of skills, and candidates may prefer to join newer startups or global technology giants rather than a company at such a critical turning point.
One potential upside for monday.com is its share price, which is hovering near a low and could leave room for a recovery if its turnaround succeeds. But the company may need to offer generous equity-based compensation to attract and retain talent. That challenge comes against the backdrop of public criticism over the doubling of compensation for founders and co-CEOs Roy Mann and Eran Zinman, a move announced alongside the company’s workforce cuts this summer.
