BEREA, Ky. — WiseTech Global, an Australian logistics software company with about 7,000 employees, says it plans to cut roughly 2,000 jobs over the next two years as part of a sweeping “AI transformation program.” Multiple outlets report the reductions equal nearly 30% of the workforce, with early impacts expected to hit product development and customer service teams first.
💻 The “End of Manual Coding”
The line that traveled fastest across the tech world this week was the CEO’s framing. WiseTech chief executive Zubin Appoo stated that large language models have fundamentally changed how software is written, tested, and maintained.
His exact quote, widely reported by Reuters and ABC News, was blunt: “The era of manually writing code as the core act of engineering is over.”
🧩 The Complicated Reality
It is tempting to treat this as the first big, clean example of “AI replaces coders.” However, the truth is more complicated, and WiseTech’s own corporate language points to that.
This is not a single, instant automation flip. It is a phased restructuring over multiple reporting periods. Furthermore, the company is concurrently dealing with the massive integration of its US-based acquisition, E2open, and broader pressures on traditional software business models. The layoffs are very real, but they sit inside a wider push to fundamentally change how the company operates and how it charges its logistics customers (shifting away from per-seat licenses to transaction-based pricing).
Still, this announcement matters because it says the quiet part out loud. A large, established enterprise software firm is explicitly tying massive workforce reductions to the productivity gains it believes it can get from AI tooling—not just to generic “restructuring.” It signals to other executives and investors that it is now financially and socially acceptable to frame deep cost-cutting as an “AI transformation,” even while the details of who does what work are still evolving.
👩💻 What This Means for Tech Workers
If you want the practical takeaway for workers and students, it is not “stop learning to code.” It is: coding alone is no longer the job description. The role of a software engineer is increasingly about:
- Specifying systems clearly and accurately.
- Testing outcomes and understanding complex data flows.
- Reviewing and auditing AI-generated changes.
- Knowing exactly how software behaves in a live production environment.
When AI can produce a massive amount of code quickly, the human differentiator becomes the ability to define the right architecture, catch subtle failures, and ship safely.
That is also where the industry’s biggest risk sits right now. When speed goes up, so does the chance of shipping something fragile. Organizations that reduce human review too aggressively will likely end up paying for it later in outages, security incidents, or legacy systems that no one fully understands. That tension will define the next few years of the labor market in software. Companies will chase AI efficiency, but teams that keep reliability and accountability intact will be the ones that hold long-term value.
🔗 Where to Read More
- Reuters: Australia’s WiseTech Global plans 2,000 job cuts amid AI overhaul
- ABC News: WiseTech losing 2,000 jobs over next two years in ‘coding era’ shift
- Australian Financial Review: WiseTech cites AI as it axes 2,000 developer and customer service jobs
🖊️ About the Author
Chad Hembree is a certified network engineer with 30 years of experience in IT and networking. He hosted the nationally syndicated radio show Tech Talk with Chad Hembree throughout the 1990s and into the early 2000s, and previously served as CEO of DataStar. Today, he is based in Berea as the Executive Director of The Spotlight Playhouse, proof that some careers don’t pivot, they evolve.