SUSE Cuts ~10% of 1,900 Staff, Memo Blames Automation and AI

SUSE will cut around 10% of its roughly 1,900 employees, and the memo tells them why: AI. In a note to staff on November 2, CEO Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen wrote that "automation and AI are fundamentally shifting how software companies operate," and that "the requirement for some existing roles has greatly diminished," according to The Register.

The schedule is tight. Staff caught up in the redundancies will be informed by November 4, employee representatives will be nominated the following day, and one-to-one meetings begin at the start of the next week. SUSE's Czech Republic staff are unionized through ICT Union, which may complicate the process in that geography.

Van Leeuwen, who joined SUSE from Red Hat in March 2023, framed the cuts around tooling: "modern tooling is already changing our daily workflows, enabling teams to move faster." He also told staff that "AI capabilities are advancing exponentially, forcing us to radically reimagine our work."

The memo is not SUSE's first run at shrinking the workforce. The Register notes that back in September the company was asking old hands if they would take "voluntary separation," and summed up what came next bluntly: "It seems not enough people chose to walk through the door, so instead, they're getting thrown through it instead."

SUSE is privately held, owned by Swedish private equity firm EQT, which bought the Linux distributor from Micro Focus for $2.5 billion in 2018, floated it on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange in 2021 "with slightly disappointing results," and took it private again in 2023. In the past 90 days our enterprise AI feed has carried a run of software-vendor memos pointing at AI as the direct cause of workforce changes; SUSE's is the latest.