Two software companies announced job cuts on the same day, and only one of them said AI was the reason. On 2 November, Squarespace confirmed it is cutting about 19% of its global workforce, around 300 people, while SUSE told staff it is cutting about 10% of a workforce of roughly 1,900. SUSE's chief executive pointed directly to automation and AI. Squarespace described its cuts as a restructuring. The difference matters, because "AI layoffs" has become a label for decisions with very different causes.
What Squarespace said
A Squarespace spokesperson told TechCrunch the company is reducing its global workforce by approximately 19%, which TechCrunch puts at around 300 employees. The Verge first reported the cuts. Investing.com, which also spoke to the company, reports that Squarespace has about 1,800 employees, that the cuts fall mostly on product and engineering teams, and that departing staff get at least 16 weeks of base pay. The company said the changes are meant to "simplify how we operate, sharpen our priorities" and help it "move faster as we position Squarespace for its next phase of growth." It told Investing.com it would not describe the restructuring as linked to plans to increase investment in AI infrastructure.
The market around it has changed fast. TechCrunch notes that AI site builders, where you describe a site and the AI builds it, have upended the website business. Lovable raised a $400 million funding round in August at a $13.3 billion valuation, and Wix bought the AI builder Base44 for $80 million last year. Squarespace has its own AI tools, including Blueprint, launched in 2024, and an upcoming AI-native platform called Forma. The private equity firm Permira took the company private in a deal valued at about $7.2 billion that closed in October 2024, according to Investing.com.
What SUSE said
SUSE, the company behind an enterprise version of Linux, was more direct. The Register, which saw an internal memo from chief executive Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen, reports that the company is cutting approximately 10% of its global workforce of about 1,900. According to The Register, the memo says automation and AI are fundamentally changing how software companies operate and that the requirement for some existing roles has greatly diminished. Staff are to be told by 4 November whether they are affected. SUSE is owned by the private equity firm EQT, and in September it had asked long-serving staff to consider voluntary separation, which The Register says not enough people took.
These details rest on The Register's account of the memo. Other outlets, including heise, have relayed it, and we found no public statement from SUSE itself, so we could not confirm the memo's wording independently.
What the rehiring forecast says
A forecast from Gartner, published in September, is a useful counterweight to the headlines. Gartner predicts that 30% of employees laid off because AI replaced them will need to be rehired by 2029, often at a significantly higher cost than their original roles. CIO Dive reports that Gartner analysed more than 1 million layoffs in 2025 and found that cuts driven by AI productivity made up under 1% of them, a figure we could not confirm in other coverage of the forecast. Gartner analyst Tori Paulman warned, as IT Brief reports, that executives who use AI mainly to cut costs risk making reductions that are too deep and too soon.
The forecast has critics. In coverage by CIO, Valence Howden of Info-Tech Research Group questioned the method behind the 30% figure while agreeing that layoffs attributed to AI have been excessive, and Frank Dickson of Dickson Research noted that Gartner gives no comparison with normal rates of rehiring after layoffs. The 30% is best read as a forecast to watch.
How to read AI layoff news
We think the stated reason deserves a careful read before the headline. SUSE's memo is an explicit claim that AI has reduced the need for some roles. Squarespace's statement describes a restructuring in a market that AI tools have changed, without saying AI did the work of the people leaving. Treating both as the same story makes it harder to judge what is happening in your own field. Our earlier pieces on Microsoft's voluntary exit offer and falling computer science enrolment show other sides of the same question.
What to do this week
If you work in software, especially in support, operations or other functional roles, four moves are worth making now:
- List the parts of your job that an AI tool already does well, and be honest about it.
- Offer to be the person who runs and checks those tools for your team, because that role grows as the tools spread.
- Keep a short log of results you got with AI, with time saved where you can measure it.
- When your company or a competitor announces cuts, read the reason actually given before drawing conclusions.
To build those skills, start with Learn, which has free courses for the main AI tools.