Updated ,first published
Australia has suffered its first major round of AI job cuts as the country’s largest locally-listed software company axed almost one-third of its workforce to manage deep fears in financial markets that new coding tools will make big technology firms vulnerable to disruption.
WiseTech Global will cut about 2000 staff – nearly one-third of its workforce of 7000 – over the next two years as chief executive Zubin Appoo bets the logistics software giant’s future on artificial intelligence.
Some teams face headcount reductions of up to 50 per cent, starting with product development and customer service, after the company realised that recent AI tool releases such as Claude Opus 4.6 from the US giant Anthropic in February had changed how software could be built.
Appoo rejected the suggestion that cutting nearly a third of the workforce risked degrading the company’s products, which are ubiquitous for freight forwarders and customs documentation.
“We’re not halving the capacity,” Appoo said. We’re halving the human capacity, but we’re significantly increasing the overall capacity through agentic AI.
“The era of manually writing code as the core act of engineering is over,” Appoo declared, calling AI “the most significant shift in decades” for software development.
The layoffs follow Commonwealth Bank making available an AI tool for new career opportunities as it cut 300 staff this week, and doomsday predictions of the future labour market roiling financial markets this week.
Those predictions have resulted in a steep sell-off across traditional software companies, from Atlassian to Adobe, driven by fears that AI-powered coding tools will allow upstarts to rapidly replicate services that took incumbents years to build.
WiseTech, though, has also recently received thousands of new staff by buying a US company called E2open and layoffs are common after acquisitions.
WiseTech, which has offices in inner south Sydney and the Melbourne CBD, follow a turbulent period for the company, has faced extensive governance scrutiny and leadership upheaval including the transition of former chief executive Richard White to an executive chairmanship.
Its layoffs clash with the technology industry’s sunny predictions that it would contribute 1 million largely high-paying jobs to the country by last year.
White was among the loudest advocates for that vision, pledging $50 million to Grok Academy, a coding education platform for school students that WiseTech also backed.
Asked how the mass layoffs squared with encouraging people to study tech, Appoo said the company remained committed to investing in Grok, though its curriculum would need a revamp. The chief executive – whose 15-year-old son wants to become a software developer – said the industry still held opportunity, but that the nature of the work had fundamentally changed.
“Schools and universities need to adapt to the world that we’re living in, where writing code is not the art. It’s the ideation, it’s the problem-solving, that’s the art,” Appoo said.
Investors responded positively to the cuts, with WiseTech shares soaring 10.7 per cent in early trading to $47.60.
The job cuts were announced alongside half-year results that painted a mixed financial picture. Revenue surged 76 per cent to $US672 million ($950 million), but excluding its recent major acquisition of E2open, that number grew at a more modest 7 per cent.
Net profit fell 36 per cent to $US68.1 million ($95 million), weighed down by E2open integration costs among other factors. Underlying profit – which excludes the purchase – rose just 2 per cent to $US114.5 million ($160 million).
Appoo said the company had been preparing for this moment for more than 12 months, by equipping engineering teams with AI tools and training them on real-world use cases.
He pointed to the launch of Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.5 in November 2025 – and subsequently Opus 4.6 and OpenAI’s GPT 5.3 Codex – as a tipping point that dramatically accelerated what AI could do, for WiseTech and all software companies.
WiseTech’s AI pivot comes against the backdrop of an extraordinary period of corporate turmoil surrounding founder White, following investigations by this masthead that revealed allegations of inappropriate behaviour towards women.
White has consistently denied wrongdoing, publicly claiming that his extreme wealth made him the target of “spurious claims” and extortion attempts.
Josh Gilbert, a market analyst at eToro, said the restructure gave investors a clearer narrative after months of uncertainty.
“Rather than being a victim of the AI revolution, WiseTech is using it to become a leaner, more profitable business, and that’s exactly what investors needed to see,” Gilbert said.
“But the company needs to prove that cutting nearly a third of its workforce doesn’t come at the expense of the product quality and customer service and that organic growth can find its feet again.”
WiseTech serves more than 22,000 logistics companies across 193 countries, including 46 of the top 50 global third-party logistics providers.
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David Swan is the technology editor for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. He was previously technology editor for The Australian newspaper.Connect via X or email.
