Snap is cutting roughly 1,000 roles, or about 16% of its staff. The company says artificial intelligence will pick up much of the repetitive work.

Major reduction follows fresh push on AI

Snap Inc has told staff it will lay off about 1,000 employees, a move that represents roughly 16% of its global workforce. The decision was disclosed in an internal memo from Evan Spiegel, chief executive of Snap, and in regulatory filings that the company has submitted this week.

The scale of the cuts is significant: about 1,000 roles, or roughly 16% of the workforce. The cutbacks come with an announcement that more than 300 open roles will be withdrawn as part of the same restructuring, meaning the company is trimming not only current headcount but also planned hires.

In his memo, Mr Spiegel framed the changes as part of a broader effort to make the company leaner and more efficient. He told employees that Snap is in a “crucible moment”, squeezed between larger rivals with greater resources and smaller startups moving quickly, and said the reductions should lower annual operating costs by about $500 million — roughly £368 million.

That said, the message from the company isn't just about saving money. Snap is explicitly tying the workforce change to the deployment of artificial intelligence inside the organisation.

How AI will be used inside Snap

Snap’s update to staff and investors described a rapid increase in the use of automated tools across engineering, support and operations. The company reported that more than 65% of new code is now generated by AI-assisted tools. Automated systems are handling more than one million support questions a month and a code-review agent has flagged over 7,500 software bugs, the company said in its filing.

“We believe that rapid advancements in artificial intelligence enable our teams to reduce repetitive work, increase velocity, and better support our community, partners, and advertisers,” Mr Spiegel wrote. The CEO added that smaller, AI-enabled squads at Snap have already driven gains in Snapchat+ subscription features, ad performance and the Snap Lite infrastructure.

Snap says its tools are already catching routine bugs, triaging user queries and producing baseline code; managers plan to move engineers onto higher-value product work — the company reports the tools flagged over 7,500 bugs and handle more than 1 million support questions each month.

Costs, charges and markets

Snap said it expects to take pre-tax charges of between $95 million and $130 million related to the restructuring, most of which will hit the second quarter. Management expects the changes to remove roughly $500 million from the annualised cost base by the second half of 2026 and has revised adjusted operating expenses for the year down by about $250 million to approximately $2.75 billion.

Mastheads

The company also gave a revenue pointer: Snap estimated first-quarter sales of about $1.53 billion.

Investors reacted positively to the announcement: Snap’s shares rose in early trading, up roughly between 6% and 9%, though the stock remains substantially below where it began the year — more than 30% down since January, according to market data cited in company filings.

Staffing history and context

These cuts are the latest in a string of workforce reductions at Snap. The company last carried out a large round of layoffs in 2022 when it cut about 20% of its staff amid an industry-wide slowdown. Snap’s full-time headcount was reported as around 5,261 employees as of December 2025 in regulatory filings, which makes the current reduction material.

Activist investor Irenic Capital Management, which took a stake in Snap earlier this year, has been publicly critical of the company’s long-term financial performance. Irenic called it “strange” that Snap remained unprofitable after more than a decade in operation, a point that has increased pressure on management to demonstrate a clear path to profitability.

What this means for roles and products

According to the company’s memo and regulatory updates, the job losses will chiefly affect areas where routine engineering and operational tasks have become amenable to automation. That includes code review, basic feature generation and the handling of common customer-service enquiries.

Spiegel said the company will rely more heavily on AI tools to boost team velocity and to allow smaller groups of employees to deliver more. He acknowledged the human cost: “This is an incredibly difficult decision, and I am deeply sorry to the colleagues who will be leaving us,” he wrote.

Spiegel told employees AI will take on repetitive tasks so remaining staff can focus on judgement-heavy product work and advertiser partnerships; the company points to early gains in Snapchat+ and ad performance as evidence.

Industrywide pattern

Snap’s cuts echo a wider tech trend: many firms that scaled quickly are now trimming costs and saying AI will shoulder routine tasks, a rationale used in recent layoffs across the industry. Leaders across tech say automation can let smaller teams keep up output and speed development, but layoffs have played out differently at each firm — companies such as Amazon, Meta and Block have all announced cuts recently.

Jack Dorsey, chief executive of Block and the former head of Twitter, warned in late February that the rise of AI tools for tech workers “fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company.” His remark underlines a wider shift in how Silicon Valley leaders are thinking about staffing, productivity and the role of human labour inside software firms.

Questions ahead

Managers now face hard operational tests — scaling AI without losing quality, reworking product timetables and proving the cost savings deliver lasting profit; Spiegel projects roughly $500m in annualised savings by the second half of 2026. There are also human questions — severance, redeployment and the short-term morale hit inside teams that remain.

Snap expects most of the restructuring charges to show up in the second quarter and believes the savings will help it reach net-income profitability, a goal management has been signalling to investors. The company will now need to demonstrate those savings while keeping product momentum and advertiser relationships on track.

What Snap says next

Snap’s leadership says the reorganisation is intended to position the company for a more efficient future where AI complements human work. The memo and filings make clear that management sees the short-term pain as a trade-off for a leaner cost base and faster product cycles.

For employees and the market, the near-term focus will be on execution: implementing the AI systems at scale, managing the transition for departing staff, and showing that the revised cost base leads to better operating results.

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“This is an incredibly difficult decision, and I am deeply sorry to the colleagues who will be leaving us,” Evan Spiegel, chief executive of Snap, wrote in the company memo.

This article was created with AI assistance.