A difficult decision to realign for our next chapter
Below is a note sent from our CEO to Freshworks employees today:
Team,
Today, I have some difficult news to share. To accelerate our biggest growth drivers and move faster in the AI era, we are realigning our global workforce. As a result, we are reducing our global workforce by approximately 11% (~500 employees). We did not make this decision lightly as this means we will be saying goodbye to many talented colleagues and friends.
Within the next 30 minutes, every employee in North America and India will receive an email from their Management leader (sent From: Leadership Comms), clarifying whether or not their position has been impacted. Due to country-specific regulations, employees in all other regions will be contacted over the coming days in accordance with local practices.
Why we made this decision and why now
We have strong momentum executing on our strategy: Employee Experience (EX) is growing rapidly as we move upmarket, over half of large deals now include AI, and more than 80% of our Customer Experience (CX) customers have upgraded to our unified Freshdesk Omni.
While our business is performing well, the pace of the AI era and recent internal changes have changed how we need to operate. We are realigning our organization around a few outcomes:
1) Accelerating growth: In March, we brought our Sales, Customer Success, and Support organization under one leader. Today, we’re launching a dedicated team for marketing, selling, and serving CX based out of India to streamline how we improve retention and win our target customer. Our Field team will be clearly focused on EX to capture the massive mid-market and enterprise opportunity. These changes create overlap across Sales, Marketing, and related support roles.
2) Evolving Product & Engineering for speed: We’ve seen strong progress across our engineering teams with over half of all code being AI-generated or AI-assisted during the development and testing processes. This has accelerated how we innovate across EX, AI, and CX with common capabilities in Platform. To help teams move faster, we are moving to a flatter structure and bringing leadership closer to customers and teams around common hubs.
3) Driving operational agility company-wide: We’ve invested heavily in technology, systems, and AI to work more efficiently. Our systems can now handle many of the manual tasks and fragmented handoffs that once required multiple teams to manage. To leverage these gains and make work simpler, we are removing management layers, centralizing functions, and rebalancing teams to make the most of our new systems.
Together, these decisions required us to realign our organization and reduce the size of our team.
How we’re supporting our departing colleagues
We are committed to supporting our departing colleagues with care and respect. All departing team members are eligible to receive severance pay based on tenure, Q1 bonuses, extended healthcare coverage and COBRA premiums (US employees), extended EAP (Employee Assistance Program) access through Spring Health, and career services and job placement support.
If we are saying goodbye to you: I am deeply grateful for your contributions and the mark you’ve made on Freshworks. Thank you for championing our customers, partners, and each other. You will always be a valued part of our story and our extended community.
How we’re moving forward
This realignment is about ensuring every Freshworks employee is focused on solving the most important problems and driving our growth strategy forward. While our structure is changing, our mission and strategy remain the same. We are uniquely positioned to continue growing across EX, AI, and CX and have an even greater impact on our customers and industry.
Please join me to hear more about these decisions and our future at Global All-Hands on Thursday, May 7, where I’ll share more details and answer your questions. Thank you for your commitment in supporting each other during this time and for being a part of Freshworks’ next chapter.
Dennis