Freshworks CEO Admits Half Their Code Is AI — 500 Software Engineers Laid Off and What It Means for Your Job

# Freshworks CEO Admits Half Their Code Is AI — 500 Software Engineers Laid Off and What It Means for Your Job

> **Quick answer:** On May 5, 2026, Freshworks CEO Dennis Woodside told Reuters that over half of the company's code is now written by AI — and announced the layoff of roughly 500 employees (11% of its workforce). The cuts hit engineering and QA teams hardest. The company was profitable and growing at 16% when it made this decision. That is the detail every software developer needs to sit with.

Freshworks just handed every software engineer a data point they cannot ignore. The SaaS company is not in trouble — Q1 2026 revenue was $228.6 million, up 16% year-over-year. Yet CEO Dennis Woodside still cut 500 jobs and pointed directly at AI-generated code as the reason. If a healthy, growing company can do this, the AI coding displacement story is no longer theoretical.

## What Freshworks Actually Said — and What the Numbers Mean

On May 5, 2026, Freshworks announced it was eliminating approximately 500 roles globally, representing about 11% of its total workforce. In a statement to Reuters, CEO Dennis Woodside was unusually direct: "Over half of our code is written by AI."

He elaborated: "That is definitely changing how we build products, how fast we can build product and the amount of people that we need to build products."