7 ms·
"We are our own most demanding customer. Cloudflare’s usage of AI has increased by more than 600% in the last three months alone. Employees across the company f
by Snoozle 5mo ago
"We are our own most demanding customer. Cloudflare’s usage of AI has increased by more than 600% in the last three months alone. Employees across the company from engineering to HR to finance to marketing run thousands of AI agent sessions each day to get their work done. That means we have to be intentional in how we architect our company for the agentic AI era in order to supercharge the value we deliver to our customers and to honor our mission to help build a better Internet for everyone, everywhere."
As an English enthusiast, I'm getting very frustrated at how the language is consistently abused in executive communications to write words without saying anything.
The implication that is NOT said is that suddenly 20% of people were sitting around without any work to do because AI was making everyone so efficient and productive. This does not, however, seem to be the reality, based on conversations within the company. It appears we have yet another case of economic downturn disguised as increasing velocity.
- lijok 5mo agoWhich part of that sentence was confusing? I found it perfectly clear. Their internal AI use is exploding, which is a signal that they need to structure for that, and so they’re laying people off as one of the first steps towards actioning that signal. Nowhere did they indicate there is less work to do, in fact quite the opposite.
- SahAssar 5mo ago> Their internal AI use is exploding, which is a signal that they need to structure for that, and so they’re laying people off as one of the first steps towards actioning that signal. I don't see anywhere where the jump from "structuring for AI" directly leads to "laying people off", unless "structuring for AI" means there is less work for people to do, do you?
- runnr_az 5mo agoI think it means - we're spending more money on AI thus we don't have as much to spend on people
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- luckman212 5mo agoThis will surely end well
- therealdrag0 5mo agoThey have been hiring like crazy year after year. Undoing 1 year of hiring is not the end of the world.
- platevoltage 5mo agoI'm sure it probably feels like the end of the world for some people.
- therealdrag0 5mo agoOf course. Being laid off sucks, but that’s not relevant to this thread.
- platevoltage 5mo agoIt's not relevant to a thread about a company laying off 20% of its workforce? sure man.
- lijok 5mo agoNoone knows what the correct structure for this new world looks like. We’ll see what they end up hiring for. But it’s fairly standard to lay off a bunch of people and hire new, rather than retrain, when you need to restructure
- solarkraft 5mo agoIsn’t it funny how the measure is how much AI is used instead of how productivity has evolved?
- lijok 5mo agoNot really. This is all so new, noone is using it correctly, because noone knows how to yet. We’re all just kind of flailing our arms around with it, but it’s clearly a force multiplier and its increased use is an actionable signal
- Snoozle 5mo agoThe sentence is not confusing, the sentence doesn't mean anything. There's nothing confusing about it, but there's no information either. "We're making great strides in AI" and "We need to cut 20% of people" are simply two statements without any connection aside from the fact that they are next to each other in the sentence.
- lijok 5mo agoOr maybe you don’t understand what it means because you’re not the target audience?
- Snoozle 5mo agoEnlighten me then as to the secret meaning behind the words used to communicate in the language we call English. Saying that AI is really transforming the company is fine. Saying that 20% of staff need to be laid off is fine. Those are understood terms. How do they relate? There's no explanation. Did cost need to be reduced? Did those people no longer add value? Was there certain projects that weren't profitable? Nothing is explained because meaning is avoided.
- simianwords 5mo ago> "We're making great strides in AI" and "We need to cut 20% of people" are simply two statements without any connection aside from the fact that they are next to each other in the sentence. Huh? How is it not connected? More productivity means fewer people are required. I'm not sure how you are not able to connect these obviously connected statements.
- draftsman 5mo ago> More productivity means fewer people are required. Required for what? If your goal is growth, and AI really is improving productivity of every employees that uses it, then why would you fire anyone?
- simianwords 5mo ago
- akomtu 5mo agoOf course it's a lie. Cloudflare is saying, essentially: "AI is making us so profitable that we've decided to reduce our profit by 20%, to keep it reasonable."
- jbverschoor 5mo agoThey’ve been pumping out products like crazy They don’t need them. Simple as that
- pm90 5mo agosomeone has to maintain a he products
- happymellon 5mo agoMore AI?
- grey-area 5mo agoGood luck with that.
- happymellon 5mo agoI'm sure that more AI will solve that problem too.
- GalaxyNova 5mo agoby laying people off they increase their profit, at least in the short term (which is all that shareholders care about)
- fauchletenerum 5mo agoNot with the severance package they're offering, which is why their stock was down between 15-18% after announcing this
- boxingdog 5mo agoFiring people because they became more productive with AI does not really make sense. If productivity went up, the company should be able to ship more, support more customers, or grow faster with the same team. This sounds less like an AI efficiency story and more like a funding or cost-control story dressed up to keep investors calm
- Izikiel43 5mo agoHere, I translated it for you (https://translate.kagi.com/?from=linkedin&to=en_us https://translate.kagi.com/?from=linkedin&to=en_us) "We’re basically using our own staff as guinea pigs. Our AI usage has spiked 600% lately, mostly because everyone from HR to marketing is leaning on bots to do their actual jobs. We’re forced to restructure the whole company around these agents just to keep up with the hype, hoping it actually helps us ship something useful and justifies the "better internet" PR we keep pushing."
- ahaferburg 5mo ago[dead]
- throwaway2037 5mo agoI will reply here assuming that you posted with good intent. I think that their PR statement is reasonable from an investor perspective. Try to detach yourself from the personal effects of layoffs. In short, they are saying: Thanks to AI, we don't need as many people to run our business. It is pretty clear to me. Sure, you can be angry about the layoffs, but the economics are clear: AI is increasing profitability faster than the business is growing, so they are using layoffs to reduce costs. Imagine that you have an HR team of five people. If AI has dramatically improved worker efficiency, can you have an equally effective HR team with only four people? That is basically what happened here.
- NewJazz 5mo agoAs an investor, it sounds fucking stupid. They aren't dogfooding, they're eating all the dogs' food. They fired some talented folks. Folks who could be retrained. Folks whose experience snd expertise is valuable. Don't kid yourself.
- simianwords 5mo agothis is a low quality comment that doesn't address the simple explanation: more productivity means fewer people are required.
- weakfish 5mo agoDisagreement != low quality, and that explanation is incredibly naive and simplistic
- throwaway2037 5mo agoI would say the GP's phrase: "more productivity means fewer people are required" is perfect summary of my opinion (and post). Sure, you can flesh if out, but that is crux of my argument.
- throwaway2037 5mo ago> They fired some talented folks. Folks who could be retrained. I see this sentiment a lot on HN. To be clear, I am responding from the perspective of US labor law and general business practices. Employment is not a sacred right in the US. The US system is (larely) hire and fire easily. As a result, the US economy is mildly unstable for the middle class normies (much, much less stable that most other highly developed nations with strong labor laws -- most of G7/G20), but overall wildly dynamic for a large economy. "They fired some talented folks." Sure. That is guaranteed with large layoffs. I work in an insanely competitive industry, and there are annual culls each autumn of the bottom 5%. Few are surprised by who gets cut. What is harder to forsee is a business downturn and they need to layoff X% of staff. You see good people let go. That's just life in that kind of system. "Folks who could be retrained." Again, in the US, for white-collar office workers, this almost never happens, and surely not for very highly skilled software developers (probably most of the layoffs at Cloudflare). It is not required by law, and it is not a common business practice in the US.
- rkachowski 5mo agoit's all marketing wank, but how can they "supercharge the value delivered to customers" through company restructuring? whether they hire 50k more people or fire everyone, the value delivered to the customer depends on the quality of the product and the price - irrelevant of cloudflare's margins.
- stephbook 5mo agoThe price obviously depends on how much salary they have to pay.
- snarf_br 5mo agoNo it does not. It depends on what the market is willing to pay.
- numbsafari 5mo agoIt’s actually both.
- srdjanr 5mo agoProducts will low/negative margins just won't happen or will get killed. But if the margin increases, they might live. Also with higher margins, more money can be invested in research/experimental products
- stephbook 5mo ago> 20% of people were sitting around without any work to do Obviously not directly, because work stretches itself to the time available.
- grey-area 5mo agoYou also have to consider nowadays whether a human even wrote most of it, or if is just a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. But yes I agree the trigger for layoffs is never massive productivity, the reasons give here are completely bogus and if management actually believe any of it the company deserves to die.
- dnnddidiej 5mo agoAka bullshit
- _heimdall 5mo agoI don't read this as employing 20% was twiddling their thumbs and sitting around. If it means anything beyond economic issues, I read the implication as their LLM expenses have gone threw the roof and with the choice of cutting LLM use or cutting headcount, well we see what mattered more to them.
- draftsman 5mo agoUnfortunately I think we’ll see more and more of this as companies continue to encourage their employees to use LLMs everywhere and for everything. Eventually they will have to come to terms with the cost of such mandates, and it’s either ask your employees to “use AI less,” or it’s let some percentage go and continue to let the rest burn tokens.
- ok_dad 5mo agoI am perplexed at how it can cost so much. I have been using AI every day, all day for a few months now and I have not even gotten to spending $300 a month. I use Cursor for teams, so we get ~$80 of usage for our ~$40 per member, then we pay Cursor's upcharged API rates from there, and I STILL don't spend more than $300 a month, if that. What the hell is everyone doing with their fucking tokens?
- datadrivenangel 5mo agoYou set cursor to use Opus 4.7 and ask it to review your branch commits and then it looks at stuff for a bit and that's $10.
- davebren 5mo agoBy judging employees by how many tokens they burn.
- RevEng 5mo agoMost of our employees don't hit their $50/month cap. Others end up into the hundreds. It depends on how you use it.
- 5mo ago
- punkbit 5mo agoI believe they meant that the cost of using an LLM is extremely high! There are reports of people spending USD $500~1000 a day! There's the possibility of decoupling of effort and output! Which causes an illusion of work.
- wreath 5mo agoWhat kind of problems do people solve that require this amount of money per month, let alone per day? Is anyone reviewing the output of the generated work (PRs, docs etc)?
- davebren 5mo agoNo, and nobody is going to find it when the guy from a third world village using a fake name that they hired to vibecode features puts a bitcoin miner in one of his daily 10k line agentic PRs.
- dzonga 5mo agocorporate lawyers tend to do the same shit. s say a lot - while saying nothing.
- downrightmike 5mo agoTypical fire until something breaks and usually that something is inertia/timelines. Stagnation really