Logistics and trade software technology provider WiseTech Global is laying off roughly 2,000 employees over the next two years—and the company is directly tying the reductions to AI.
WiseTech Global, which operates supply chain technology solutions CargoWise and E2open, has already cut 500 of those roles in the first half of fiscal year 2026, CEO Zubin Appoo said in an investor briefing Tuesday.
“We see clear evidence that we can deliver greater output in shorter time frames with smaller AI-enabled teams,” said Appoo in the call. “AI is executing code reviews, generating automated test cases, identifying edge cases missed by humans, resolving defects end-to-end using agentic workflows and accelerating the pace at which we can deliver value to customers.”
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Appoo said the initial role reductions delivered net cost savings “ahead of plan and ahead of schedule.”
The cuts would impact nearly 29 percent of the Australia-based company’s nearly 7,000 employees, with up to 50 percent of staff across product development and customer service departments getting terminated.
“A transformation of this scale will fundamentally reshape our cost base whilst allowing for an uplift in productivity,” Appoo said. The company says it will keep monitoring “future benefits” of AI to headcount.
Recent model launches, particularly Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.3 Codex, have enabled the company to further enhance CargoWise’s AI-powered agent “Ace” across its product suite, according to Appoo.
AI has assisted CargoWise in reading documents more rapidly, performing complex customs classification with higher accuracy and speed, assessing trade compliance risk in real time and automating workflows that previously required significant manual effort, he said.
WiseTech is escalating spending elsewhere, investing heavily in R&D to the tune of $175.3 million in the first half to accelerate the development and deployment of AI capabilities. The expenditures mark a 28 percent increase from the year prior, but have decreased as a percentage of revenue from 36 percent to 26 percent due to last year’s $2.1 billion E2open acquisition.
Appoo noted that WiseTech increased its AI investments in early 2025, ahead of his assumption of the CEO role last July. The chief executive said he has worked closely with senior product and development staff over the past six months to embed AI capabilities directly into company workflows.
AI’s effects on employment have been hotly debated, but recent layoffs like the 30,000 cuts at Amazon have shifted the narrative further toward concerns of wider job displacement. Goldman Sachs economist Pierfrancesco Mei wrote in a note Tuesday that AI-driven displacement could add up to an additional 0.3 percentage points to the unemployment rate in 2026.
The brass at WiseTech is aligned in agreement that AI will make some waves in the labor market, with Appoo declaring in the call “the era of manually writing code as the core act of engineering is over.”
“It is hard to transition a company from a model where most of the code is written by humans to a model where most of the coding is an orchestration of a very senior person who is a product person or a software architect, but that is the new model,” said WiseTech chairman and former CEO Richard White.
White said the updated model would be anywhere from two to 10 times more efficient than what companies can currently produce out of any software development team.
“Individually, people can do far, far more work with AI than they could have done even nine months ago,” said White.
Enterprise software companies including WiseTech have seen their stock plummet in 2026 amid worries that platforms including Claude, ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini could threaten their business models.
But the AI-related job cuts appear to have had the opposite effect on investor sentiment at WiseTech due to the technology’s scale and embedding across critical logistics infrastructure, whether it be customs agencies, airlines or port authorities. The tech provider also recently shifted its revenue model so that it is tied to transactions processed, instead of per-seat licenses that shrink when customers cut headcount.
“This positions us well because our revenue is not diluted by customers becoming more productive,” said Appoo.
The Hapag-Lloyd partner’s stock popped 10 percent in after-hours trading on Tuesday, before rising another 4 percent through Thursday.
The layoffs overshadow the company’s first-half earnings report, in which total revenue grew 76 percent to $672 million, when including sales numbers from E2open. Organic revenue jumped 7 percent to $422.6 million. The CargoWise platform is the largest driver of the company’s top line, with year-over-year revenue increasing 12 percent to $372.4 million.
WiseTech reeled in net income of $68.1 million in the half, down 36 percent from the year prior.
The impact of the restructuring is not expected to be material to full-year earnings in 2026, with execution costs related to the layoffs expected to offset any near-term savings.
