On July 23, Monday.com — the Tel Aviv-based work-management software company — told the SEC it would cut about 20% of its workforce, north of 600 people, as part of what it called a “restructuring plan” tied to the “ongoing transformation of its product, marketing, and go-to-market strategy.” TechCrunch has been keeping a running list of companies doing something similar; Monday.com is simply the latest name added to it, not an outlier.

If you work at one of these companies, or one like it, the filing itself is public information you can actually read. Most people don't, because SEC filings are written in a dialect designed to be technically accurate and practically uninformative. That's not necessarily deception — securities lawyers write these documents to limit liability, not to help employees war-game their own job security. But if you know what the boilerplate is hiding, you can extract a real signal about whether your specific role is exposed, or whether “AI” is doing narrative work for a cut that would have happened anyway.

Where to actually look

Public companies disclose workforce reductions with expected material costs under Item 2.05 of Form 8-K — the section reserved for “costs associated with exit or disposal activities.” That's the filing to pull, not the press release. Press releases are written for reporters and investors and tend to lead with the most flattering framing available (“transformation,” “realignment,” “sharpened focus”). The 8-K itself, and any accompanying investor letter, usually has to be a little more concrete about which costs, which charges, and — sometimes — which functions.

Three things to check, in order:

1. Does the filing name a function, or does it name a percentage?

Monday.com's language names three functions explicitly: product, marketing, and go-to-market. That's more specific than most. A filing that just says “we are reducing our workforce by X% to improve efficiency” with no functional detail is telling you almost nothing about where the cuts land — it's a blunt cost target, and AI may be mentioned once in a sentence about long-term productivity without describing any actual role displacement. A filing that names functions is worth taking at face value about where to look next, even if it doesn't say which specific jobs within those functions are cut.

For Monday.com specifically: “go-to-market” is a sales-and-marketing term of art, not an engineering one. Read literally, the company is telling you the cuts concentrate in how it sells and markets the product and in some part of the product organization — not necessarily in core R&D. If you're an SDR, a marketing ops person, or a product manager on a team that's being consolidated, that's a closer signal than if you're a backend engineer at the same company. The filing doesn't rule out engineering cuts, but it doesn't point at them either.

2. Is AI cited as a cause, or cited as a consequence?

Watch the sentence structure. “We are eliminating roles because AI tools now handle this work” is a causal claim about a specific function — usually customer support, first-line content production, QA, or other high-volume repeatable tasks. “As we continue to transform the business for the AI era, we are restructuring to align with our strategic priorities” is not a causal claim about anything. It's a growth narrative attached to a cost cut, aimed at investors who want to hear that management has a story bigger than “revenue growth slowed.” Both kinds of language get reported in headlines as “company cites AI in layoffs,” which is why the TechCrunch-style running lists are useful for tracking the trend but not for judging any individual company's actual situation. You have to read the specific sentence, not the headline about it.

3. What was hiring like at this company 12–18 months before the cut?

This isn't in the filing — it's in the company's own past earnings calls, job postings history, and headcount disclosures, all of which are also public. A company that grew headcount aggressively during 2023–2025 and is now cutting 15–20% is very plausibly correcting overhiring, with AI as a convenient and investor-friendly explanation. A company that held headcount roughly flat and is now cutting a specific function is a stronger case for that function being genuinely displaced by tooling. Cross-referencing the restructuring filing against the hiring trend it followed is the single best gut-check available to an outsider, and it takes about fifteen minutes with a company's investor relations page and LinkedIn's headcount trend graph.

A practical checklist for your own situation

If your employer — or a company you're interviewing with — has filed one of these, work through it in this order:

  • Pull the 8-K, not the press release. Look for Item 2.05 and any named functions or cost categories.
  • Check whether your function is named. If it isn't, the filing isn't telling you much about your specific risk, whatever the headline says.
  • Read the sentence around “AI” ­literally. Is a task or function named as being automated, or is AI attached to a general growth story?
  • Compare against the hiring trend. Rapid prior growth plus a broad cut leans “correction”; flat headcount plus a targeted cut leans “genuine displacement.”
  • Look at what's growing, not just what's shrinking. Restructuring filings sometimes note where the company is investing the savings. If it's the same function being cut, that's a strong signal the work isn't disappearing — it's being redefined, and there may be a version of your role on the other side of it.

None of this tells you with certainty whether you personally are safe. It can't — these documents aren't written for that purpose, and no outsider reading a filing can override the actual judgment of the people making the org chart. But treating “company blames AI for layoffs” as a single undifferentiated category, the way a headline-scanning read of the news tends to, means missing the difference between a company that's telling you something real about which tasks are changing and a company that's telling investors a story. Reading the filing itself is the fifteen minutes of work that separates the two.