Autodesk lays off a further 1,000 staff
Autodesk is to lay off 7% of its workforce, or around 1,000 jobs: the second such round of layoffs in less than a year.
The news comes as the company is once again reporting increased net revenue across all of its business sectors for the most recent financial quarter.
In a memo to employees, CEO Andrew Anagnost attributed the latest layoffs to the completion of a “two-year journey to modernize our GTM [go-to-market] organization”.
Anagnost said that the layoffs “will not become an annual process at Autodesk” and were not “an effort to replace people with AI”.
Autodesk’s second set of job cuts in a year follows continued strong financial results
The job cuts are Autodesk’s second in under a year, following the axing of 1,350 jobs last March.
As with last year, they follow a strong set of financial results, in all of Autodesk’s key businesses.
In its 8-K filing for the financial quarter that ended on 31 October 2025, Autodesk reported a total revenue of $1.85 billion, up 18% on the same quarter last year.
Net revenue was also up in real terms on the previous year for all of Autodesk’s four main product families: AECO, AutoCAD, Manufacturing, and Media and Entertainment.
M&E is the smallest of Autodesk’s business sectors, and had the weakest growth, but includes the products that CG Channel readers will be most familiar with, including Maya and 3ds Max.
Which parts of Autodesk’s business will be affected by the cuts?
As with the previous layoffs, most of the layoffs are expected in sales teams, not R&D.
Although the company is still contacting affected employees, Anagnost said that he expected “most of the impact in our customer-facing sales teams”.
So why is Autodesk laying off staff again?
In the memo, Anagnost cites the completion of the company’s two-year shake-up of its GTM organization – its sales and distribution strategy – as the “primary driver” of the latest layoffs.
Once again, he cited investment in AI capabilities and new industry ‘clouds’ like Flow, its cloud-based platform for Media and Entertainment, as a secondary factor.
However, Anagnost also stated that “this will not become an annual process at Autodesk and these changes are not driven by the external environment or an effort to replace people with AI”.
Agreement now reached with activist investors
In our story on last year’s layoffs, we noted that Autodesk had been facing pressure from activist investor Starboard Value to deliver increased returns to shareholders.
A few weeks after the previous layoffs were announced, Autodesk issued a public statement in response to what it described as “Starboard’s self-serving campaign”.
The companies reached a settlement in April 2025, with Autodesk adding two new directors to its board, although it resisted the attempt to add Starboard founder Jeff Smith.
Read Andrew Anagnost’s memo to Autodesk employees on the Autodesk website
Read Autodesk’s 8-K filing for its Q3 2025 financial results
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