Zoho’s Sridhar Vembu says it is retraining staff as Airtable cuts jobs

Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu said in an online post dated October 14, 2026, that the software company retrains and redeploys employees as AI lets smaller teams do more work. His comments followed a reported layoff announcement at Airtable and set out how Zoho says it is responding to staffing and cost pressures in the software industry.

What Airtable said about its layoffs

The Times of India attributed Airtable’s announcement to Federico Simionato of Bending Spoons, which owns the software company. According to the report, Simionato said the cuts were unrelated to employees’ performance and reflected a belief that smaller teams could deliver more and better work. The report did not establish how many employees would lose their jobs.

Simionato described a leaner product operation, The Times of India reported. It would include a core team working on features requested by customers, alongside investment in Omni, Airtable Canvas, MCP capabilities and infrastructure. Those plans provide the immediate context for Vembu’s response: the two companies have described different approaches to organising their software teams.

How Vembu says Zoho handles smaller teams

Vembu called layoffs normal in software as a service but said Zoho had refused to take that route. When AI productivity allows a team to operate with fewer people, he said, Zoho retrains employees and moves them to new products or customer support. Both The Times of India and Business Today reported those comments; the accounts do not independently verify Zoho’s employment practices.

Costs and staffing at Zoho

Business Today reported that Vembu had said earlier in the week that Zoho had cut its marketing budget, could not increase pay this year and was trying to avoid mass layoffs. He also said the company’s employee count had not increased over the previous 18 months. These are Vembu’s descriptions of Zoho’s position, rather than independently confirmed staffing figures.

Vembu described the software business outlook as uncertain, citing server prices, data storage and growing AI use among the sources of higher costs, according to Business Today. He said Zoho was in the middle of reinventing itself and that the next three to five years would show how that effort worked. For employees, his stated approach means retraining and reassignment as work changes; its longer-term results remain to be seen.