The announcements clustered in the last ten days of July. monday.com cut 620 jobs on July 22 [2]. Visa cut about 2,600 on July 28 [1]. Chime cut 150 on July 31 [3]. Magic Leap, in the same window, moved to cut 193 as it walked away from building its own headsets [4]. Each reached for the same word: AI.
Visa's reduction is roughly 7 percent of a workforce of about 34,100 [1]. Chief Executive Ryan McInerney told staff the cuts would let the company reinvest, and tied the change to technology: "AI is also helping to accelerate this evolution and shape the way work gets done at Visa" [1]. The people absorbing that evolution are 2,600 employees, concentrated in technology and product teams [1].
monday.com's cut is steeper as a share of its staff, 620 roles, or 20 percent [2]. Co-founders Roy Mann and Eran Zinman framed it as opportunity: "We entered a new era where AI is transforming the role of software, creating the greatest opportunity our industry has ever seen" [2]. The greatest opportunity, in this case, ran through a fifth of the company's payroll.
Chime laid off 150, about 10 percent of its workforce [3]. Chief Executive Chris Britt put the logic more bluntly than most: "AI is changing what's possible but requires new skills" [3]. Requiring new skills is a tidy way of saying the old jobs were not kept.
Magic Leap belongs on the list with an asterisk. Its 193 cuts follow a decision to stop building augmented-reality headsets and become a waveguide supplier for other companies making AI display glasses [4]. The company's framing is about manufacturing, not automation. Scott Carden, its display-engineering head, described the pivot as "solving the toughest challenges of scaling waveguide production, from industry-leading waveguide performance to manufacturing" [4]. The link here is the destination, not the mechanism: the AI-hardware market pulled the strategy, and 193 jobs went with it.
Read together, the announcements share a move. AI appears as the reason for cutting, the justification for cutting, or the market the survivors are pointed toward, and in each case the arithmetic lands on the same side. Visa's 2,600, monday.com's 620, Chime's 150 and Magic Leap's 193 come to 3,563 paychecks that stopped [1][2][3][4]. The executives quoted here kept their jobs. Their statements describe a transition; the cost of it was paid by the people the statements do not name.
What the filings do not settle is how much of the work these employees did is now being done by AI, and how much of "AI" is a familiar cost decision wearing a newer label [1][2][3][4]. The companies assert the former. The layoffs are the part that is documented.
