AI bites hard on jobs.
Chief executive Zubin Appoo on Wednesday morning announced 2,000 redundancies over the next two years, as the Aussie tech giant pivots heavily towards artificial intelligence.
Approached by news.com.au at the company’s Alexandria building that afternoon, one worker said they’d been kept in the dark.
“We don’t know anything. We’ll find out later today, there’s a meeting scheduled for 3pm,” they said. “We’re not allowed to talk to you mate,” said another.
WiseTech Global Chief Executive Zubin Appoo announced about 2000 redundancies over the next two years as the Aussie tech giant pivots heavily towards artificial intelligence.
On Wednesday, the company confirmed the redundancies would affect about 29 per cent of staff across 40 countries, with some teams expected to be slashed by as much as half.
It remains unclear how many Australian jobs will be affected.
Product and development, along with customer service roles, will be among the first impacted as AI is rolled out across both its software platforms and internal operations.
WiseTech employed more than 3,600 people worldwide as of June 30, 2025.
“Software development has experienced its most significant shift in decades,” Mr Appoo said.
“I am prepared to say this clearly: The era of manually writing code as the core act of engineering is over.
“AI amplifies the productivity of our expertise in logistics and trade, the rich datasets that WiseTech holds, and the network advantage that we have built over 30 years. And it allows us to move faster from ideas to real customer value through the efficiencies it brings in software development and product creation.”
The company’s share price jumped 11 per cent on Wednesday’s news, but it has been in broad decline for years, dropping 66 per cent from its all-time high of $142 in November 2024.
Software companies have been hit with fears of disruption recently, as investors worry that AI will erode pricing power and make products easier to replicate.
WiseTech, which makes software that runs global freight logistics, is no exception.
‘We tried to warn you’: Top AI expert says we aren’t prepared.
The mass sacking came just hours after news.com.au published a story about a chilling warning from UNSW Scientia Professor Toby Walsh at the National Press Club.
With hundreds of jobs already disappearing, Australia’s artificial intelligence debate is no longer theoretical. As one of the world’s most credentialed AI experts, Professor Walsh said the conundrum has now gone far beyond the point of pontification for our nation’s leaders.
Simply put, Australia is not equipped for the existential questions that come with an evolutionary event as vast as Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).
Prof Walsh’s speech titled “AI: doom or boom?” detailed both the “extraordinary opportunity” and the “serious threat to Australian society” the exploding technology pose.
UNSW Scientia Professor Toby Walsh telling Australia’s leaders about AI at the National Press Club.
He said we have a generational opportunity to make the most of lightning-fast language models, but questioned if we are doing our best to mitigate all the glaringly obvious risks.
“In hindsight, the title should not be boom or doom, but boom AND doom,” Prof Walsh said. “Because my childhood dreams are turning into a reality that is both good and bad.”
WiseTech’s call comes as one of Australia’s richest men has lost almost half his net worth amid a brutal global tech sell-off sparked by fears AI will make his company obsolete.
Mike Cannon-Brookes, a climate activist and net zero champion who was worth $14.9 billion just last year, now has a net worth of around $7.7 billion as his company Atlassian’s share price continues a brutal downward spiral.
He came out swinging this week saying claims AI would kill his company are “ludicrous.”
Atlassian is a leading Australian-American software company that develops products for software development, project management, and team collaboration.
The company became a NASDAQ-listed tech powerhouse that generated billions of dollars in revenue, but its share price has plummeted almost 74 per cent in the past 12 months.
One of the big factors driving this decline is the fear that AI makes traditional Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies like Atlassian obsolete.
In early February 2026, companies like Anthropic and OpenAI released “AI Agents” that can autonomously manage tasks and write code. Investors fear these agents will replace the human software developers who are Atlassian’s primary users.
Atlassian also makes money based on how many “seats” (users) a company pays for. If a firm uses AI to do the work of 10 people with just 2, for example, Atlassian loses 80 per cent of its revenue from that client.
Amid the share price tumble and AI fears, Atlassian this week called a halt on hiring engineers and filling other related roles, rolling back its global recruitment.
Desperate applicants claim they’ve been “ghosted” or had offers snatched away at the eleventh hour.
Job seekers have taken to social media and employee forums like Blind to vent their frustrations after being caught in the sudden recruitment shutdown.
“Got an [engineering] offer … After three weeks of silence I finally messaged the hiring manager on LinkedIn they told me it’s a hiring freezing [sic],” one person posted on employee forum Blind.
“Same my interview in 6 hours was just cancelled and all I was told was the position is no longer available. Very frustrating as I’ve been prepping for weeks,” another post from last week reads.
Atlassian employs more than 12,000 people and usually has hundreds of positions available. But its global jobs board now shows just 40 vacancies in sales and a dozen positions for general interns and graduates.