A Salesforce rival plans job cuts and blames AI for diverting customers

A question put to an assistant

Take an estate agency owner. It's a made-up example, but a familiar one. She needs software to track her leads and sales. A few years ago, she would have typed "best CRM software" into a search engine, clicked three or four links, maybe an ad. Today, she asks an AI assistant, which answers with a short list and the reasons behind it.

According to the head of the company in question, that small habit now threatens hundreds of jobs in Tallinn, Tartu and Lisbon. At least, that's the explanation he gives in writing.

The company is Pipedrive. It sells customer relationship management (CRM) software to small sales teams, squarely on the turf of Salesforce and HubSpot, the two rivals its own website compares itself with. Founded in Tallinn in 2010, it became a unicorn when the US fund Vista Equity Partners took a majority stake in 2020, and it claims more than 100,000 customer companies.

And it makes money. The 2025 accounts of its Estonian company, filed with the commercial register, show 237 million euros in revenue and 32.7 million euros in operating profit. They don't cover the whole group, whose parent is American, and we'll come back to that.

The biggest restructuring in its history

On October 29, CEO Paulo Cunha published a letter to employees on the company's website. In it, he proposes shrinking the company markedly across all its sites: fewer teams, fewer management layers, fewer offices. Most existing roles would be affected, he writes.

The letter gives no numbers. Estonian media supply them. According to ERR's information, 219 jobs would go in Tallinn and 48 in Tartu, or 70% of the roughly 380 employees in the country. According to the business daily Äripäev, as cited by ERR, the Lisbon office in Portugal would close. It has about 220 people, per Estonian World.

The company hasn't confirmed any of this. Its marketing director told Äripäev she couldn't even say whether the Tallinn and Tartu offices would stay open, since labor laws differ from country to country. These are still proposals: where the law requires employees to be consulted, nothing will be decided until that process is over, the letter says.

"Not replacing people with AI"

The clearest passage is a single sentence: "This is not an exercise in using AI to reduce costs," Cunha writes, "nor replacing people with AI."

What he describes is something else. Pipedrive grew, he explains, on three pillars: finding customers cheaply online, keeping them as they grow, and selling them more over time. The first one has seized up. More and more small businesses ask AI for advice when choosing software. The result, according to him: the "free traffic" that fueled Pipedrive's growth has fallen sharply, and the paid traffic bought to replace it costs more.

Picture a well-placed shop whose street has been rerouted. The window is as polished as ever, the product unchanged, but passers-by no longer take that sidewalk. To draw a few in, you have to rent billboards at ever higher prices. AI didn't take the saleswoman's job. It moved the street.

The letter doesn't name Google or any assistant. It talks about "free traffic" and paid search, which Pipedrive now wants to depend on less.

What the accounts show

The 2025 annual report of Pipedrive OÜ, the Estonian company and its subsidiaries, filed with Estonia's commercial register in late June, shows 237 million euros in revenue, up 11%, and 32.7 million euros in operating profit. That's a long way from a shop on the verge of pulling down the shutters.

Two caveats. These accounts don't cover all of Pipedrive: the parent company is American, and the Estonian entity resells part of its software to it. And the scope changed during the year, when the Prague, Portugal, UK and Ireland subsidiaries were folded in on July 1, 2025.

Operating profit is down from 42.5 million euros in 2024, and advertising and sales costs rose from 64 to 73 million. But those comparisons aren't like for like, and the advertising and sales line doesn't say how much goes to search engines. The management report, for its part, doesn't mention traffic. It talks about cautious small businesses facing high interest rates, and a software industry having to adapt to AI.

What the letter leaves out

Cunha's explanation is his own, and it isn't quantified. How far has free traffic fallen? What does a new customer cost today? The letter offers a diagnosis without showing the X-ray, and there's no way to measure it from the outside.

Nor does it name a single cause. Customers, the CEO writes, also expect more from the software itself: logging conversations, updating records and doing part of the work. That's what Pipedrive is building with its in-house assistant, Nova. And the letter leaves a door ajar: where AI genuinely changes the shape of a team's work, the company promises to explain it during the consultation.

Then there's the owner. Vista Equity Partners, a software-focused fund, has controlled Pipedrive since 2020. Sergei Anikin, the company's former chief technology officer, told Äripäev that the scale of the cuts could signal preparation for a sale, according to Estonian World. It's a hypothesis, and nothing public confirms it.

Julia Jolkin, founder of the IT recruitment firm IT-Talent, warns, according to Estonian World, against the temptation to pin everything on AI: slowing growth, lost customers or rising costs also weigh.

A street publishers already know

Publishers have lived what Pipedrive describes for two years. Google's AI Overviews answer the question before anyone clicks, and the reader never makes it to the article. In late October, Google itself acknowledged that its AI Mode earns less than its links: when the answer arrives ready-made, there's less room to sell.

What's new is a profitable software company putting that mechanism in writing just as it announces a plan touching most of its roles. For three years, we've been asking which jobs AI will do in our place. In Tallinn, the question is different: who will still make it to the shop window when a machine points the way?