Fiverr cuts 30% of staff in pivot to being 'an AI-first company'

250 people now have the chance to sell their freelance services on the site

ai-pocalypse Freelance services marketplace Fiverr has told around 250 staffers that they are back on the market as it pivots to having "a modern, clean, AI-focused infrastructure from the ground up."

The company confirmed on Tuesday to The Register that it would lay off around 30 percent of its workforce. In an extended essay on X, founder and CEO Micha Kaufman said that AI was going to mean a fundamental rethink and that the 15-year-old freelance services bazaar is "going back to startup mode."

"This transformation requires a painful reset, and as we make it, we will be parting ways with approximately 250 team members across the different departments, resulting in a smaller and flatter organization," he lamented.

"We need to go back to a startup mode, with speed and agility, a flatter organizational structure, and an AI-focused infrastructure and methodology."

AI offered staff the chance to "liberate humans from manual and tedious tasks," he opined, and "unlock capabilities that were historically not possible or too expensive." Kaufman promised severance packages and extended health insurance to departing employees.

He is presumably also looking for a stock price boost with the announcement. Fiverr's market cap peaked at around $11 billion in February 2021 when shares were trading at over $320 apiece. On Tuesday, the stock price is hovering around the $23 point and dropped slightly after the announcement.

The move shouldn't really come as a surprise to employees; Kaufman gave fair warning. The founder sent out an email to staff in May saying that AI was coming for everyone's jobs. He warned staff that they need to use AI to replace the mundane tasks of their jobs - wanting people to automate "100% of what they are doing," he told CBS.

"I'm looking at this from an executive standpoint is we were given superpowers, but this should reflect in how people work. So my expectations are double or triple the output per unit of time, and the same for the quality per unit of delivery," he said.

"AI actually forces us to rediscover our humanity, the things that we are special in the special attributes of every person." ®