In a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission today, Autodesk announced that it was restructuring its sales and marketing organization (again, still), which the company expects will “result in the termination of approximately 7% of its workforce, or approximately 1,000 employees, with a significant portion of the reductions occurring within customer-facing sales functions.”

Why? To reinvest “A portion of the resulting savings … in key strategic priorities across the Company throughout its fiscal year ending January 31, 2027.” Important: the filing does not cite humans being replace by AI as a reason.

Autodesk says this is part of its changing “go-to-market strategy, [as it has] streamlined customer engagement, and enhanced its sales channels to drive sustainable growth, while improving efficiency and driving operating margin growth. The implementation of this Plan will mark the culmination of Autodesk’s sales and marketing optimization program. Separately, the Plan also reallocates resources in certain other functions to accelerate Autodesk’s strategic priorities.”

The filing also details cost savings, separation expenses, and so on – read it if that interests you.

The part of the filing that I found most interesting is the letter to employees from Andrew Anagnost, in which he writes, in part,

“I recognize the weight of this news, particularly as it follows the organizational changes we made last year. I want to be clear 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 … This announcement reflects a deliberate decision by leadership to align our organization with our long-term strategy and the opportunities ahead … To our team members who are impacted, I want to extend my sincere appreciation for your contributions to Autodesk. Many of you have been instrumental in the transformation journey that brought us to where we are today. You have built the foundation of this company and will always be a part of Autodesk’s story.” You can read more of his letter at the link above.

I worked for Computervision earlier in my career — a rocketing company when I joined, but on its knees by the time I left. Towards the end of my time there, layoffs happened often, and it’s soul-crushing. Both to be laid off (of course, the impact on those people is HUGE) and to those left behind, who probably have to do more (management words about streamlining and so on — all of the laid off people were doing something that someone else has to do now), and grieve their missing colleagues and friends. It’s hard and very disruptive.

What is this likely to mean for customers? Unclear. Missing from the filing is any explanation of precisely what the customer-facing jobs being eliminated did, but I imagine that many customers won’t be able to reach the sales and post-sales resources they had been calling for help. And that’s likely to put more pressure on the sales channel partners to pick up that slack — and many of them have already been reworking their own resources to meet Autodesk’s new go-to-market strategy.

We can see the rationale, the financial benefits (Autodesk’s share price is up 3% as I write this, compared to an overall Nasdaq Composite that’s up 0.5% or so), and so on — but it’s a shame that Autodesk couldn’t find other jobs for these 1,000 humans.

Update: the original title implied that the 7% was of sales and marketing. That’s wrong. It’s 7% of total staff.