Culture Amp cuts 60 jobs as AI focus grows

Melbourne software unicorn Culture Amp has shed another 6% of its workforce, with the loss of around 60 jobs.

The employee engagement platform cut 9% of its workforce – 90 roles – in 2023, so the latest losses suggest the business grew back to around 1000 employees over the last 2.5 years.

Previously 36 roles went in 2020 amid the coronavirus downturn.

The redundancies, first flagged on Capital Brief, fell across several departments, and come just weeks after the business launched AI Coach, a conversational AI interface, amid an increasing focus on artificial intelligence-led products.

Culture Amp nonetheless is still advertising for around a dozen staff in Melbourne and nine in Sydney, mostly for engineering roles, including for AI Coach.

“Culture Amp is redistributing resources to more closely align with our key growth opportunities, and as a result, earlier this month made some reductions to the size of the team (approximately 6% of our workforce),” the company said in a statement to Startup Daily.

“These changes are primarily driven by our strategic priorities and adjustments to our operating plans, allowing us to accelerate the delivery of our product innovations, like​ our new personalised coaching tool, AI Coach.”

The layoffs occurred around the same time a Culture Amp amp manager posted about “job hugging” on the company’s blog, saying “he rise of job hugging signals a workforce that may look stable on the surface but is actually at risk of widespread disengagement and stalled growth”.

Author Kelly Luc also pointed to AI-driven anxiety as a potential cause for the phenomenon.

“We’re starting to see the early effects of AI on the job market. A study by Stanford University’s Digital Economy Lab found that since 2022, early-career workers in the most AI-exposed occupations have experienced a steep 13% relative decline in employment,” she wrote.

“This finding suggests that skill obsolescence and technology displacement are no longer distant possibilities – they are happening now.”

This week the Culture Amp blog offered its 2026 predictions, saying “As more of their function gets outsourced, HR leaders are tasked with designing an AI-augmented workforce”.

“In 2026, HR leaders will have to take centre stage in reimagining a workplace and workforce that is both highly digital and human,” the post said.

“HR will need to (re)design the relationship between humans and machines at work…. As AI-augmented managers step in to do more with less, we may soon face a very different kind of shortage – not of HR, but of people actually willing to lead.”

In 2021, Culture Amp’s valuation reached $2 billion following a $135 million Series F double the valuation of 2019’s $121 million series E.

The business began in 2009 and counts TDM Growth Partners, Sequoia Capital China, Salesforce Ventures, Skip and Grok Capital, the family VC funds of Atlassian co-founders Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar, among its backers.