Tell your team the AI plan before a filing or a rumor tells it for you

On July 22, monday.com told employees it was cutting about 620 jobs, 20% of its workforce. By the end of that day, anyone who cared could read three different explanations of why.

The Form 6-K filed with the SEC described a leaner operating model tied to an AI-driven growth strategy. The co-founders’ letter to staff said the company built for its last chapter didn’t fit “the new AI era,” and that improving margins “was not the purpose of this decision.” The FAQ that went out with it said the cuts were not about reducing costs or replacing people with AI. A week earlier, the board had canceled 10.875 million unissued shares set aside for employee incentives.

Each of those statements may be true. Put side by side, they read like a company that hadn’t settled on one story before it started telling it. I’m not picking on monday.com. Plenty of smaller companies are in the same spot, only quieter. My point is about order. Your team should hear the plan from you, in plain words, before they piece it together from signals.

People believe the signals over the memo

Employees don’t wait for an announcement to form a view. They watch what changes. A hiring freeze on a team. A new AI tool showing up in the shared drive. A vendor demo on the calendar that nobody explained. A budget line for “automation” in the planning deck someone left open on a shared screen.

Each of those is a small fact. Without a plan to hang them on, people connect them themselves, and the version they build is almost always worse than the real one. By the time the official memo arrives, it is competing with a story that has had three weeks to spread at lunch.

That is what happened in miniature at monday.com. The share cancellation, the filing language and the memo each sent a different message. A person reading all three has to decide which one is the real one. Most people pick the one that scares them most. And at a company of 50 or 100 people, there is no filing to blame. The signals are smaller, like a manager who stops backfilling roles or a new login nobody explained, and they travel faster because everyone sits closer together.

Before and after

What people pieced together

• Incentive shares canceled
• Filing says AI-driven strategy
• FAQ says not to replace people

→

What they needed

• One plan in plain words
• Heard first from the CEO
• Same words in every channel

Most workers haven’t been asked

This isn’t a rare failure. In a survey of more than 3,000 people, Jobs for the Future found that 56% said their employer had not consulted them on how AI tools are used in their work. Only 36% said they had the training and resources they needed, down from 45% the year before.

By the numbers

56%

of workers said their employer had not consulted them on how AI is used in their work

So for most workers, the default is silence. Leadership is buying tools, running pilots and talking to vendors, and the people whose work will change are finding out sideways. I understand why. A plan feels unfinished until it is finished, and nobody wants to stand up and say “we’re still working it out.” But an unfinished plan told early beats a finished plan told late, because by then your team has already filled in the blanks.

A plan worth telling fits on one page

You don’t need a deck. You need a page that answers what your people are actually asking. When I help a company decide where AI should do its work, this is the page I want them to be able to write before anything goes live:

• The first piece of work we are giving to AI, named as a task. “Drafting replies to shipping questions” rather than “customer experience.”
• What we are not doing this year. Only what is true. If you don’t know, say you don’t know.
• Who owns the agent and who checks its work.
• What happens to the hours it frees up, team by team.
• When we will next update everyone, with a date.

Say you run a 60-person distribution company. Your page might read: an agent will draft answers to “where is my order” emails starting in September. Nobody in customer service is losing their job this year. Dana, the team lead, owns the agent and approves every reply for the first month. The hours each rep gets back go to calling accounts that haven’t ordered in 90 days. We will meet again on October 1 to report what happened. Five sentences. Everyone in the building can repeat them.

If you can’t fill in one of those lines, that’s useful too. It tells you the plan isn’t ready to roll out, which is a better thing to learn now than after the tools are live.

Write it once and use the same words everywhere. The all-hands, the manager talking points, the board update and, if you are public, the filing. If your investors hear “efficiency” and your team hears “growth,” someone will notice, and they will assume the investor version is the honest one.

Go first, even when it’s uncomfortable

The CEO has to say it. A memo from HR or a rollout email from IT reads as an announcement of something already decided. When the first message about AI comes from the top, in a room or on a call where people can ask questions, it carries a weight that a forwarded memo never will.

Say it before the first agent goes live, not after. Say what you know and what you don’t. Then keep the promise about the next update, even if the update is “nothing has changed.” Showing up again on the date you named matters more than having big news.

When leadership knows one thing and the team guesses another, the space between fills with fear. AI makes that space wider, because the headlines are doing half the talking for you. TechCrunch now keeps a running list of tech companies that cited AI in layoffs, and monday.com was the latest of 21 when it updated the list on July 25. Your people read those stories and wonder if they are next.

You can’t stop them reading the news. You can make sure that when they think about your company, the first version they heard was yours.

FlowThe order that keeps trust

1. 01Write the one-page plan
2. 02CEO tells the whole team
3. 03Managers repeat the same words
4. 04Tools go live
5. 05Update on the promised date

What to do this week

1. List every AI tool, pilot or vendor conversation underway in your company. Include the ones a department started on its own.
2. Write the one-page plan using the five lines above. Give yourself one hour. Leave blanks where you don’t know yet, and mark them.
3. Read your last investor update and your last all-hands notes side by side. If they describe AI differently, fix the gap before anyone else finds it.
4. Book a 30-minute session with the whole company within the next two weeks. You present the page. Take every question.
5. Put the date of the next update on the calendar before that session ends.

Sources

• monday.com to lay off 20% of workforce (CTech by Calcalist, July 22, 2026)
• Monday.com is cutting 20 percent of its workforce as it pivots to an AI work platform (The Next Web, July 22, 2026)
• Monday.com is the latest tech company to blame AI for layoffs, here are 20 others (TechCrunch, July 25, 2026)
• Worker anxiety over AI is growing, and employers aren’t preparing employees for what’s next, new survey finds (Jobs for the Future, March 11, 2026)