If you wanted to design a company whose layoffs would carry maximum irony, you could hardly do better than Culture Amp. The Australian software firm sells, as its entire reason for existing, tools that help employers measure how their people feel — engagement surveys, “employee experience” dashboards, sentiment analytics. It has even published material on how to manage the impact of layoffs on the staff who survive them. This week, it got to run that playbook on itself, for the third time in three years.
The cut
Culture Amp has let go of around 70 employees — roughly 9% of its workforce — according to Australian outlet Capital Brief, which first reported the cuts. Some accounts put the figure slightly lower, at about 60 roles or 6% of staff, and the exact number may settle as the dust does. Either way, this is not a one-off. The company shed roughly 90 people in early 2023 and another 60 in late 2025, only about seven months ago. Three rounds, three years.
The framing this time has a familiar shape. New CEO Caroline Rawlinson, who took the top job in January after co-founder Didier Elzinga moved to executive chair, described the move as “organisational changes across a number of teams to align investment with our refreshed strategic priorities.” Reporting on the cuts has tied that realignment to a growing focus on AI products — the now-standard story in which money and headcount get pulled out of existing teams and pointed at an AI roadmap.
”Align investment with strategic priorities” is doing a lot of work
It is worth translating that sentence, because it is the load-bearing phrase. “Aligning investment with refreshed strategic priorities” means: we are taking money we were spending on these people and spending it on something else. When the something else is AI — and a new CEO arrives with a mandate to refresh the strategy — the layoff stops being an admission of trouble and becomes a slide in a vision deck. The roles are not cut; they are “realigned.” The people are not let go; the priorities are.
This is the same move LostJobs has watched all year, just performed by a smaller company in a more on-the-nose industry. A new chief executive walks in, the existing cost base gets relabeled as legacy, and the AI roadmap supplies a forward-looking reason for a backward-looking cut. Culture Amp is not necessarily being cynical here; HR software is exactly the kind of product where AI features — summarizing survey responses, drafting manager nudges, flagging at-risk teams — are real and probably do reduce the headcount needed to build and support the platform. But “we are investing in AI” is a far better thing to tell customers and investors than “we have now reduced staff three years running.”
Why an engagement company’s third cut is worth noticing
The temptation is to treat this as a small story — 70 jobs at a mid-sized SaaS firm is a rounding error next to Oracle’s 21,000 or Meta’s 8,000. But it lands differently because of what Culture Amp does. This is a company whose product thesis is that engaged, well-supported, psychologically safe employees are the foundation of a good business. Its software exists to help other companies keep their people happy and on board. And it has now cut its own headcount three times in three years, the latest round dressed in the language of an AI pivot.
There is a useful pattern in that for anyone reading their own employer’s tea leaves. The euphemisms are remarkably consistent across the economy now: “realigning investment,” “refreshed priorities,” “strategic focus on AI.” They appear whether the company makes databases, telecom billing, enterprise workflows, or — yes — employee-happiness surveys. When the firm whose entire business is measuring how workers feel reaches for the same phrasing as everyone else, it is a good sign the phrasing has become pure boilerplate, detachable from any specific reason. The honest version of Culture Amp’s announcement is short: it has cut staff again, and this time AI is the word that makes it sound like a plan.
If your employer sells the idea that people are its greatest asset and then trims those assets on an annual schedule, the asset, it turns out, was the survey software.
