Amperity layoffs 2026

The leadership read

The founder return and the layoffs are a single operational decision, not two separate events. When Slager and Shahani replaced an externally-recruited CEO after roughly 18 months, they inherited a team built around a different product thesis: a data-unification layer operated largely by human services and implementation work. The restructuring is an acknowledgement that AI tooling has collapsed the labour intensity of that model. The CFO being elevated to president simultaneously signals that the next operating chapter is being run by a tighter principal group with direct control over both capital allocation and product direction. This is one of 12 layoff signals we have tracked across the last 90 days, and the most directly comparable are AI-linked workforce reductions at enterprise-software peers rather than the banking cohort or trading-house stress cases also in the set. Qualtrics, also Seattle-based, restructured around the same period following a major acquisition and product reset. The consistent pattern across enterprise SaaS signals in this window: companies are not simply cutting headcount but recomposing it, reducing roles tied to manual data operations and workflow management while holding or growing product and AI engineering capacity. Across companies executing this kind of recomposition in the customer-data and enterprise-SaaS corridor, the functional areas facing sharpest demand are AI product management (specifically at the seam between model output and customer-facing workflow), revenue leadership capable of repositioning a platform's value story after the underlying delivery model has changed, and customer-success leadership built for high-autonomy, lower-touch engagement rather than traditional enterprise services. The founders running the business directly compresses the decision cycle; the commercial layer around them has to match that pace.