CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm that gained widespread recognition after causing a significant worldwide IT disruption last year, has announced plans to cut 5% of its workforce due to so-called “AI efficiency.”
In a statement to staff, which was also included in US stock market filings, CrowdStrike’s CEO, George Kurtz, revealed that the company will eliminate 500 positions globally. He attributed this decision in part to the advancements in artificial intelligence within the business.
Kurtz explained that AI has the effect of flattening the hiring landscape and facilitating faster innovation from concept to product. He added that AI drives efficiencies across both the customer-facing and operational areas of the company.
The company points to market trends and the need to expand its range of products as other reasons behind the layoffs. It is estimated that the restructuring will result in costly expenditures of up to US$53m.
Despite these changes, CrowdStrike reported a revenue increase of 25% to US$1bn for the fourth quarter of the 2025 financial year, despite incurring a loss of US$92m.
A faulty update CrowdStrike released to its cyber threat detection software caused an outage affecting 8.5m Windows systems worldwide in July of the previous year. The disruption led to widespread chaos in sectors including avionics, healthcare, broadcasting, transaction systems, and personal computing.
Analyst Aaron McEwan from consulting firm Gartner expressed skepticism regarding the announcement, especially when companies cite AI advancements alongside reduced workforce forecasts. He views it as a possible justification for layoffs due to financial difficulties, rather than true AI-driven efficiency advancements.
Gartner’s own research has shown that less than half of employees are utilizing AI in their work, with only 8% of them using AI tools specifically to increase productivity.
University of New South Wales professor of artificial intelligence, Toby Walsh, criticized CrowdStrike’s decision as ill-timed following the previous year’s outage, suggesting that the cut workforce could have been better redirected toward emergency response and bug fixing.
Associate professor in computational intelligence at the Australian Catholic University, Niusha Shafiabady, views AI-induced job replacements as an unavoidable reality. She expects many traditional jobs to be displaced by advancements in AI and technology due to the cost savings and enhanced service delivery it offers companies.
The World Economic Forum anticipates that almost 23% of all jobs globally will undergo changes in the next five years due to AI and related developments. Despite an expected creation of 69m new jobs, 83m jobs might be eliminated, leading to a net job market reduction of 2%.
Both McEwan and Shafiabady predict that companies—tech companies in particular—will increasingly explore using AI to reduce their workforces in the future, even while acknowledging the potential for AI to augment rather than replace human workers.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/may/09/crowdstrike-to-cut-jobs-and-use-ai
