As the Australian software firm WiseTech lays off thousands of employees in a pivot to AI, its CEO Zubin Appoo has become the target of violent threats, the company says.
Richard White, WiseTech’s founder, revealed the news in an email to the company’s staff on Sunday, the Financial Review reported.
White said the company had already been facing “several serious and deeply concerning incidents involving personal attacks.”
But “in the past week, this escalated into a handwritten threat of violence made against our CEO, Zubin Appoo, containing personal information and offensive comments directed at members of his family,” White wrote in the email to staff, per the Financial Review.
Security was ramped up at the company’s Sydney office “because of the serious nature of the threat,” he added, and the threat was reported to police.
The threats come after a dragged out layoff-saga at WiseTech which has left employees frustrated and confused. In February, the company stunned the rank and file by announcing that it was firing 2,000 staff, or about a third of its entire workforce. But who was getting the axe was unclear, leaving employees in agonizing suspense. For months, they waited to hear if they were part of the cuts, but never got clarification.
The agony was amplified Monday, when staff received messages in the morning saying their role was “impacted,” before getting another communication two hours later asking for their personal email address for further communication, according to the Financial Review. Except this was followed by another twist, when the emails were deleted from employee inboxes by WiseTech’s IT administrator, and succeeded by a similar email that gave only a fifteen minute deadline to submit information.
Rubbing salt in the wound, the one thing WiseTech leadership was sure to communicate was their love for AI. Appoo told investors that he was expecting “further efficiency gains” over time as AI capabilities improved. And White, even more blithely, boasted that AI agents could complete training in mere minutes that would take humans weeks.
“It doesn’t take much effort to convince people, in the end, that they’re stupid to be paying $100 for labour when you can pay $2 for the AI,” White said at an investment conference earlier this month, per the Financial Review.
Harbingering the new paradigm, White also revealed an “AI agent credo” for the company, stating: “Capacity is no longer constrained by people or time.”
With job cuts looming and AI being waved in their faces, morale at WiseTech has plummeted.
“People are being told to keep delivering as usual, while also helping roll out the AI tools that are supposedly meant to replace them,” one employee told The Guardian earlier this month. “All of this while everyone’s left waiting to find out if they’re in the 50 percent.”
The alleged threat illustrates how tensions around AI layoffs are running high across myriad industries. Earlier this month, Standard Chartered CEO Bill Winters sparked a storm of controversy after calling the employees he planned to replace with AI “lower-value human capital,” forcing him to not only issue an internal memo clarifying his remarks but, after that apparently didn’t go over well, even make a public apology.
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