Australian logistics software firm WiseTech Global plans to eliminate around 2,000 jobs as it embeds artificial intelligence across its engineering and customer service operations, the company said Wednesday. The cuts, which will begin in the second half of FY26 and extend into FY27, will “reduce teams – initially product & development and customer service across the company, including e2open, by up to 50% in terms of headcount,” the company said in a statement to the Australian Securities Exchange. Affected employees will not be redeployed elsewhere within the company, the statement added. “Software development has experienced its most significant shift in decades,” Chief Executive Zubin Appoo said in the statement. “I am prepared to say this clearly: the era of manually writing code as the core act of engineering is over.” According to information available on the company website, WiseTech makes CargoWise, a supply chain management platform used by more than 22,000 companies across 193 countries, including 23 of the 25 largest global freight forwarders. Appoo said AI amplifies “the productivity of our expertise in logistics and trade, the rich datasets that WiseTech holds, and the network advantage that we have built over 30 years.” But Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst and CEO at Greyhound Research, cautioned against taking the AI efficiency narrative at face value. “The claim that manual coding as the core act of engineering is over is not an engineering conclusion,” he said. “It is a strategic positioning statement.” AI-assisted development has improved workflow speed, Gogia acknowledged, but the deeper story, he said, is elsewhere. “AI becomes the justification layer for a cost structure reset.” Vendors restructuring alongside their customers WiseTech is not alone in making that calculation. Salesforce reduced its customer support workforce from around 9,000 to 5,000 last year, citing AI. Microsoft cut approximately 15,000 roles over 2025, with CEO Satya Nadella noting AI tools now write up to 30% of the company’s code. AI was cited as the primary driver of nearly 55,000 US layoffs in 2025, and company boards are pushing CEOs to cut workforce costs by 20% or more through AI. WiseTech’s cuts add to that wave of AI-related workforce reductions — this time hitting the software vendors that enterprise organizations depend on. Gogia said WiseTech’s move formalizes a broader shift. “AI is no longer being positioned as a feature enhancement,” he said. “It is being positioned as a labour compression lever. We are witnessing the shift from AI as augmentation to AI as a workforce strategy.” For CIOs, that shift is already arriving at their door. A new risk for enterprise customers For CIOs running operations on CargoWise, the cuts raise immediate questions about continuity. WiseTech’s own statement disclosed that 11 of its largest freight forwarder customers currently have less than 20% of expected users live on the platform — meaning several major implementations are mid-rollout as the vendor halves its engineering and support teams. Gogia said the highest risk period would not be immediate. “The highest exposure window is six to eighteen months in, when experienced engineers have left, AI systems are still maturing, and support processes are being re-wired,” he said. CIOs should seek named human accountability at escalation levels beyond automated triage, he added, and contractual SLAs that guarantee time to human escalation, not just response acknowledgment. Alongside the job cuts, WiseTech disclosed a commercial model shift with direct implications for enterprise software buyers. The company said approximately 95% of CargoWise customers had already transitioned to its new transaction-based pricing model — the CargoWise Value Packs — away from per-seat licensing, following a December 2025 launch. The rationale, as Appoo stated plainly, is structural: “For SaaS businesses that monetise on seats or users, AI will disrupt them.” As AI reduces human headcount at customer organizations, seat-based revenue shrinks — a vulnerability enterprise software vendors have broadly been grappling with . WiseTech said it made “the early and deliberate decision to transition away from seat fees to focus on monetising transactions, where pricing is aligned to the value delivered through automation, throughput and scale.” Gogia said the shift was significant beyond WiseTech. “This is not a WiseTech-specific phenomenon,” he said. “It is a structural SaaS rebase triggered by AI economics.” He warned that the transition introduced new cost volatility for enterprise buyers – transaction-based pricing is sensitive to seasonal volume spikes, exception-heavy periods, automation retries, and supply chain disruption events. WiseTech did not respond to a request for additional comment.