What the removal of ClickUp tells us about the future of work

AI’s most successful proponents have argued for some time that the technology will usher in an era of unprecedented productivity, highly profitable for those who use it and weeding out those who don’t.

Zeb Evans, CEO of the affiliate program ClickUp, says that change is imminent. Last Thursday, Evans was announced on X that the company, which was last calculated in 2021 at $4 billionit laid off 22% of its workforce but it shows that the cuts are not just cost-cutting, but a greater embrace of AI that could take the company to the next level.

“Most of the money saved from this change will go back to the people who live in it. We will introduce million dollar pay bands. If you create more power using AI, you will be paid outside the traditional bands,” wrote Evans.

ClickUp recently launched nearly 3,000 internal AIs to handle a variety of complex tasks on behalf of its employees, according to a A matter of luck published a few days ago. Instead of doing the work themselves, employees now have to guide these employees and ultimately review the output to ensure that it meets the company’s goals.

Evans’ goal, according to his X post, is for AI to make ClickUp a “100x org.”

ClickUp is not alone in its hope that AI assistants will provide significant benefits.

In fact, according to a recent Gartner study, nearly 80% of companies using automation technology have reduced operations. However, the survey found that the shortage of workers it doesn’t really translate good returns.

While Gartner’s findings suggest that some companies use unproven AI as a reason to slow down, ClickUp proves it’s not one of them.

Evans told TechCrunch via email that the startup is seeing benefits from AI assistants. Not only is ClickUp testing its channels internally, but it also appears to be planning to incorporate them into upcoming products for its customers.

“Instead of just fiddling with the value of tokens, we measure the value created and save time,” Evans wrote.

In recent months, more and more companies have begun to monitor the use of employee signals, using them as a metric to determine who is using AI tools. But critics argue that “tokenmaxxing” – as the concept is known – is the wrong metric because it only increases the amount of AI.

“People who only work with AI will always have jobs,” Evans said in his post. But if AI continues to do more work, ClickUp will need fewer people, eliminating those who can’t do their jobs well.

Tech circles have been thinking about this for a long time.

One extreme example of a high-tech startup using AI to the max already exists. Polsia, a one-year-old startup that claims to be all about software for solopreneurs, is run by just one person: founder and CEO, Ben Broca. This success is clearly paying off: Polsia just got bigger $30 million at a cost of $250 million.