WiseTech Cuts 2,000 Jobs as They Invest in AI

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The mass layoffs in the tech sector are not limited to the US. 

Australia’s largest Tech company is cutting approximately 2,000 jobs over the next 2 years. That is nearly one-third of its entire global workforce of around 7,000 people.

WiseTech Layoffs Explained 

The reason? AI.

This is not a story about a company in trouble. It is a story about a company investing its entire future in the idea that AI can do the work of thousands of humans.

More than 500 roles had already been eliminated earlier in the financial year, and the remaining cuts will roll out through to the 2027 financial year. 

Main roles hit in these layoffs are in product development, customer service, and operations teams. 

AI is Coming for Australian Tech Jobs

WiseTech’s relatively new CEO, Zubin Appoo, openly embraced AI at the company’s half-year results briefing. He called it a “deliberate AI transformation journey” and made a statement that has already become one of the most quoted lines in Australian corporate history:

“The era of manually writing code as the core act of engineering is over.”

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That’s a huge statement. It doesn’t mean humans are no longer needed. But not many. The nature of the job will completely change.

Some teams are expected to shrink by up to 50%, with the company replacing human labour not with more humans, but with Agentic AI systems that can autonomously handle complex workflows.

“We are halving the human capacity, but we’re significantly increasing the overall capacity through agentic AI.”

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He pointed specifically to the release of Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.5 in November 2025, followed quickly by Claude Opus 4.6 and OpenAI’s GPT 5.3 Codex/

Rolling out WiseTech’s customs compliance software in a new country can now be done six to seven times faster thanks to AI. The economics of keeping large human coding teams suddenly stopped making sense.

The company says the shift toward AI is not just about cost-cutting, but a strategic change to remain competitive in a fast-moving technology environment. 

“This marks one of the most important inflection points in our 30-plus year history.”

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They are rapidly changing how they build and run their software by using more AI.

Bottom Line

For Australia, the WiseTech cuts carry symbolic weight. The technology industry had long promised to deliver one million high-paying jobs to the country. Now the biggest company is eliminating coding roles at scale.

Asked how the mass layoffs squared with encouraging kids to study tech, Appoo was direct: 

“Schools and universities need to adapt to the world that we’re living in, where writing code is not an art. It’s the ideation, it’s the problem-solving, that’s the art.” 

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Still, this layoff is one of the largest seen in Australia, tied directly to AI.