Productivity-software maker ClickUp is cutting hundreds of staff and replacing them with "thousands of AI agents," the nine-year-old startup confirmed in reporting on 25 May 2026. The framing — staff replaced numerically by autonomous agents — is one of the first cases of a venture-funded software company stating the substitution publicly, rather than couching the layoff as restructuring or efficiency. The operational details (which agents, run on what stack, integrated into which workflows) are not in the company's external communication; the framing alone is the news event. Expect the playbook to be copied.