Patreon cuts 20% of workforce as CEO cites AI's transformative impact on tech operations

Patreon lays off off 20% of its workforce

Patreon is laying off 20% of its workforce, or 93 people, CEO Jack Conte told employees on Thursday. In a memo to staff that was shared online by the company, Conte said Patreon's core business is strong but that the platform has to respond to market changes and adjust its cost structure to remain stable, which is why it needs to make the "painful" but necessary cuts. Conte wrote that "AI has fundamentally transformed the tech industry," and that the pace of change has "never been more intense." However, Conte went on to note that Patreon isn't making the cuts because it wants to replace employees with AI. "To be clear about the impact of AI on today's decision: we are not making the above changes because we believe AI replaces humans," he wrote. "The more we have learned to use these new tools, the clearer it has become that they are not substitutes for the creativity, judgment, detail orientation, or craftsmanship that our teammates have in spades, nor do they replace the desire for human connection that all of us cherish so deeply. That's my personal opinion, but more importantly, it's the foundation of Patreon's strategy: our product vision and business are both predicated on the value of human creativity and human connection." He continued, "AI has fundamentally transformed the tech industry, though, including how we work, how we build products, how we communicate, and more. That does have an impact on how we operate and organize." Beyond the headcount reduction, Conte said Patreon is also restructuring how it operates, "flattening" its organizational chart and refocusing teams around its top priorities. Affected employees will receive at least 16 weeks of severance pay, plus an additional week for every year worked, healthcare coverage through the end of the year, and a $1,500 stipend to replace their company laptop. Last week, Patreon announced that it was partnering with internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare to directly block access to AI bots designed to train their AI models on creators' work without permission. The company said it had to enhance its efforts on this front because AI scraping has become more sophisticated. The move came as online publishers and creators are grappling with AI companies using their work to train AI models. Patreon's latest round of layoffs is the platform's largest since it cut 17% of its staff back in 2022. During that earlier round of layoffs, Patreon also closed its offices in Berlin and Dublin.

Patreon is laying off 20 percent of workers

Patreon is laying off 20 percent of its workers, or around 93 employees, as reported earlier by 404 Media. In a memo to employees, Patreon CEO Jack Conte writes that the company isn't making these changes "because we believe AI replaces humans," but says AI has "fundamentally transformed the tech industry, including how we work, how we build products, how we communicate, and more." That shift has changed "how we operate and organize," Conte writes. During an interview on Decoder, last month, Conte laid out his stance on AI, saying that the company is "100 percent embracing" AI tools internally to continue serving creators: If Patreon does not fully embrace these tools as a product and engineering company -- and we are ultimately a product and engineering company -- and use them to give the power back to creators, we, as a company, will be dead in three years. Patreon previously laid off 17 percent of workers in 2022, as well as closed its offices in Dublin and Berlin.

Patreon is laying off 20 percent of its staff - Engadget

While the company is trying to protect creators from AI, it still thinks the technology is changing how it does business. Patreon is laying off 20 percent of its staff or 93 employees, according to a blog post from CEO Jack Conte. The layoff announcement, which was first reported on by 404 Media, notes that while Patreon's business remains strong, it needs to adjust the company's cost structure to make it "a stable, dependable rock" for creators. "We're making a number of changes to our organizational structure and how we work," Conte says. "Specifically, we're flattening the organization, refocusing teams on our top priorities and evolving key aspects of our operations to make us faster at adapting to change." Laid off employees will be offered 16 weeks of severance and an additional week of pay for each full year they worked at the company, along with medical benefits through the end of the year and a stipend to purchase a laptop. The company is also offering additional make-good payments for some employees who aren't eligible for other payouts. As in other layoffs, the specter of AI looms large over Patreon's restructuring. "AI is not a replacement for human creativity," but it does "have an impact on how we operate and organize," Conte says. The issue is seemingly existential: In an interview from early this year, the CEO stressed that Patreon needed to embrace AI as a "product and engineering company" or "we, as a company, will be dead in three years." That stance is notable because the company has largely taken the opposite tact when it comes to the creators that use its platform. Patreon announced on July 16 that it's adopting Cloudflare's AI Crawl Control tool to limit what companies are able to scrape from creators' pages to train AI. When the majority of Patreon's content was blocked by a paywall, crawlers were a non-issue, but now that the company is encouraging users to offer free content and use the platform as a form of social media, more creators' work is vulnerable. "Some search crawlers can actually help people discover creators off-Patreon. They index pages, organize information, and direct users back to original sources like your Patreon," the company said in the announcement. "Other crawlers collect your work to help train AI models. We're continuing to allow the former while restricting the latter."