About 1,000 employees — nearly one in five — are being shown the door at Wix, a move CEO and co-founder Avishai Abrahami has described as the deepest restructuring the company has ever undertaken. In a public X $TWTR post that went out to employees at the same time it went live, Abrahami pointed to two catalysts: the growing cost burden created by a strengthening shekel against a dollar-denominated revenue base, and the imperative to reorient the business around artificial intelligence.
At the close of the first quarter of 2026, Wix's headcount stood at 5,277, with Israel accounting for the majority — more than 60% — of that total, according to The Next Web. Once the reductions are complete, the company's total workforce is expected to settle at around 4,200. Those losing their jobs will be reached out to one-on-one and given what Abrahami called personally tailored severance arrangements.
Because Wix collects revenue predominantly in dollars while its largest employee base draws salaries in shekels, the currency's appreciation has quietly inflated the company's cost base in ways that cannot be engineered away, Abrahami said. Against the dollar, the shekel gained approximately 14% over the course of 2025 and has added another 7% through the first five months of this year, according to The Next Web.
On the AI front, Abrahami framed the moment as a fundamental shift in how companies operate. "We have witnessed the most significant shift in how companies are built since the invention of modern programming languages in the 1970s," he wrote. "This is not just about adopting new tools — it is about rewiring how companies are built, how they think, how they manage and how they operate." Reorganizing around AI also means stripping out hierarchy: Wix is collapsing its management layers to speed up decision-making, and has begun staffing a new category of role it calls xEngineer — a position conceived from scratch for employees whose work is centered on AI-native tools.
The layoffs follow a difficult stretch for Wix stock. On May 13, a first-quarter earnings miss sent the stock tumbling 27%: despite $541 million in revenue — a 14% annual gain — the company swung to a net loss of $57.5 million, according to The Next Web. The sell-off has cut Wix's market value to around $2 billion — a fraction of the nearly $20 billion valuation the company commanded at its 2021 height — with shares down more than half since January.
Wix has also been contending with competition from AI-powered website-building tools. An $80 million purchase of vibe-coding platform Base44 earlier this year, noted by The Next Web, has so far done little to blunt the challenge posed by rivals like Lovable.
Wix's announcement lands amid a broader surge of AI-linked job cuts across the tech sector; industry trackers put the total number of positions eliminated in 2026 at more than 95,000, per The Next Web.