Pipedrive is cutting most of its Estonian jobs. The reason it gives: customers now ask AI which software to buy

Pipedrive, the sales software company founded in Estonia, announced on 29 October what its chief executive Paulo Cunha called the largest structural change in the company's history. The company will shrink in every location, with fewer teams, fewer management layers and fewer offices. According to his message to staff, most current roles are affected.

ERR reported that 219 jobs in Tallinn and 48 in Tartu will go, about 70% of the roughly 380 people Pipedrive employs in Estonia. The company did not confirm those figures. The group has nearly 800 employees, and its office in Portugal is closing. Where local law requires consultation, final decisions wait until it ends.

Why AI is in this story

The message says plainly that the change is not about cutting costs with AI or replacing people with AI. The AI connection runs through customers. More small businesses now ask AI tools which software to use instead of searching for it. The free traffic that powered Pipedrive's growth has dropped sharply, and the paid traffic bought to replace it costs more.

Customers also want something different from the product. Cunha wrote that they expect software to capture work and data on its own, suggest the next step and take on routine tasks. Pipedrive is now building an AI-based sales system around that, narrow its focus to sales teams and lean less on paid search, winning demand through product, brand and content instead.

Doris Põld, who heads the Estonian IT and telecommunications association, told ERR that new technology and AI are pushing the whole sector to rethink its costs and the skills it needs.

This is not only a software problem

Pipedrive had a large marketing team, years of search data and a well-known brand, and the shift still caught up with it. Any company that finds customers through Google faces the same question: when a buyer asks ChatGPT, Gemini or Copilot for a recommendation, does your name come up? If not, that buyer may never reach your website, and paid ads become the only way back in.

What to do on Monday

• ✳Pull organic search visits and the leads they produced for the last 24 months, month by month. A slow decline is easy to miss until you put the numbers side by side
• ✳Ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Claude the questions your customers would ask, in Estonian and in English. Write down whether you are named, which competitors are, and which pages the answers cite
• ✳Set up your analytics to count visits from AI assistants as their own channel, so you can see whether that traffic grows
• ✳Add "an AI assistant recommended you" as an option when you ask new customers how they found you
• ✳Before you raise the ad budget to cover lost traffic, work out what a lead costs from ads today compared with a year ago
• ✳Check that your website states plainly what you sell, to whom, where and at roughly what price. AI assistants can only recommend what they can find and quote

Pipedrive learned about the shift from its own traffic numbers. Most smaller companies have the same numbers sitting in their analytics and have not looked yet.