Yotpo’s Big Pivot: AI Takes the Wheel as 200 Employees Let Go
Hey, so there's been some major news coming out of the Israeli tech scene, and it’s a big shake-up from a well-known player in the e-commerce space — Yotpo. You’ve probably come across their tools if you’ve ever browsed customer reviews or loyalty programs while shopping online. Well, as of this week, they’ve made a pretty bold move: Yotpo has laid off around 200 employees, which is roughly 34% of their global workforce. That includes about 80 people from their Israeli office, with the rest spread out across their teams in the U.S., Europe, and Australia.
Now, why such a big cut? It's part of a deep shift in strategy — Yotpo is going all in on AI. They're essentially reshaping the company to become what their CEO, Tomer Tagrin, calls an “AI-native” business. That means putting artificial intelligence not just into their products but into every part of their operations — support, marketing, engineering, even internal processes.
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As part of this transition, Yotpo is shutting down its Email and SMS marketing divisions — which were actually acquired before the whole ChatGPT era really took off. They’re selling that part of the business to a U.S. company called Attentive, reportedly for tens of millions of dollars. But instead of exiting the marketing space entirely, they’re planning to integrate Attentive’s services directly into Yotpo’s platform, while doubling down on their core products: Reviews and Loyalty.
Tagrin has acknowledged that this wasn’t an easy decision. He called the layoffs painful but necessary, saying the future of companies like Yotpo lies in being smaller, more focused, and heavily driven by AI. He gave a heartfelt thank-you to the departing employees, recognizing them as a foundational part of the company’s DNA.
What’s interesting is that Yotpo’s already seeing results from this pivot. They’ve launched a suite of AI-powered tools — things like automated review summaries, smart sorting, translation support for 50+ languages, and even something called “Reviews Atlas,” which analyzes review data at scale. There’s also a beta version of a new Loyalty Tiers system, and all of this is being adapted for use in large language models — think AI that understands and works with customer feedback at a whole new level.
Internally, Yotpo's walking the talk too — 70% of basic customer support is now handled by AI, 90% of their marketing campaigns over the past year were AI-generated, and by 2026, they expect 40% of all new code to be written using generative AI.
So even though it’s a tough moment for the team, this really is a significant pivot. And with over 25,000 brands still using Yotpo — names like IKEA, Steve Madden, and GoPro — it looks like they’re aiming to stay competitive by evolving fast in an AI-driven world.
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