Swedish SaaS company Upsales Technology AB just announced layoffs for 20% of its workforce, 80% of affected roles are developers.
Of course it's to replace them with AI. The CEO had this brilliant plan that will surely work out great for them:
"We see them merging into one role instead. Instead of having a designer, a developer, a tester, a product owner and a project manager, it's one person. We call it a builder. That's the new title," he says.
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Swedis SaaS company lays of 20% of staff and says one person will be designer, developer, product owner and PM…
byu/dewpa inFuturology
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The listed CRM company Upsales is cutting its workforce by almost 20 percent. But it’s not about saving money in a crisis, but about AI taking over the tasks in a step to streamline, according to CEO Daniel Wikberg.
In an interview with Breakit, he talks about the decision.
“It’s been true for ten years that you always need more developers – that’s not the case anymore.”
recently, the saas company upsales announced that it is carrying out a reorganization that will reduce its workforce. In total, this involves approximately 14 positions that will disappear from the head office in stockholm.
the announcement may seem strange given that upsales describes itself as a profitable growth company with accelerating figures during the year.
in the report for the third quarter of this year, upsales reported a turnover of 38.2 million kronor, an increase of 7 percent. operating profit (ebit) strengthened at the same time to 10.9 million kronor (8.8) and annual recurring revenue (arr) amounted to just under 148 million kronor at the end of the period.
when breakit reaches CEO daniel wikberg, he admits that the decision may be perceived as counterintuitive to many.
“It has been a truth in the industry for ten years that you always need 25 percent more developers than you have. But this is in no way a cutback, it is just a result of us finding many ways to become significantly more efficient in how we both build and design the product with AI,” says Daniel Wikberg.
For example, they use AI tools such as Cursor and Claude Code to streamline coding.
Replacing specialists with “builders”
It is primarily the development team that is affected by the cuts. According to Wikberg, in principle 80 percent of the positions affected are developer roles.
The background is that the company is changing to a new type of organization where the classic specialist roles are being relaxed.
“We see that they are merging into one role instead. Instead of having a designer, a developer, a tester, a product owner and a project manager, there is one person. We call it a builder. That is the new title,” he says.
Despite the fact that developers are leaving, Daniel Wikberg believes that AI is not generally replacing humans, but rather changing how value is created. He paints a picture of a future where every employee acts as their own “mini-CEO” with a staff of digital assistants.
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“In general, all roles will be broader. For each person, there will be ten AI assistants that they work with,” he says.
How has the staff taken this news?
“We are very careful to handle this in as nice, human and respectful a way as possible. But the industry is moving in this direction, it is super clear. You can’t fight it, you have to find the efficiency gains you can. Sometimes that means very tough decisions.”
How much have you weighed soft values, such as the anxiety it can create in the team, in the decision?
“It’s never fun to make a change like this. These people who are affected are super talented people. It’s not an A or B team, it’s just that we need a different organization.”
“My view is that making a change like this is 100 percent the right decision for the business. It is a necessary decision to remain competitive. We have reasoned that we should not be afraid of the turbulence that the possible decision could create, if it is the right decision.”
“Cannot replace salespeople with AI”
Upsales had around 75 employees before the notice. Going forward, Daniel Wikberg believes that the distribution of the workforce will change. The product team is predicted to decrease in relation to the total strength, while sales and marketing (Go-to-Market) will need more people.
“If you want to take market share, then I don’t think you can get away with saying that you need ‘more boots on the ground’. You can’t replace salespeople with AI. There are many who believe that, but our type of relationship sales B2B, it is very difficult,” he says.
“If I had to guess, I would probably think that the product team’s share of the total team, it probably won’t be as big in three years as it was three years ago.”
At the time of writing, Upsales has a market capitalization of around 508 million, an improvement of just over 1 percent since the turn of the year.
Welcome to your typical salesforce.com job (me). You gather your own requirements as a BA, build it yourself like a dev, test it yourself like a QA, role it out and do all the user training while putting your BA hat back on, then administer that functionality til the end of time. All while managing the road map and back log and story board like a product owner. All while only getting an admin salary.
I assume that doesn’t come with a pay rise lol.
This would be awesome if agentic AI even with customisations produced perfect results every time, but it doesn’t, it still needs overview.