Booksy Lays Off 200 Employees Despite Building a Global Success Story from Poland

Booksy, a Polish appointment-booking app for the beauty and wellness industry known for its global expansion, is laying off about 200 people, roughly 20 percent of its workforce. The decision was announced by founder and CEO Stefan Batory, who tied the job cuts directly to the company's accelerating adoption of artificial intelligence.

What Batory Announced

In a message to employees, Batory wrote plainly that the company is shrinking its organization by about 20 percent. The message was direct, without the corporate softening typical of announcements like this. The CEO acknowledged that parting ways with part of the team would be painful, since it involves people the company values.

We will have to say goodbye to colleagues we value greatly - Stefan Batory, founder and CEO of Booksy

Batory stressed that the goal of the restructuring is not solely to cut costs, but to prepare the company for further investment and product development in a new technological reality. In his message to the team, he noted that today's decisions are meant to allow Booksy to keep investing and innovating in the years ahead.

Today's decisions will allow Booksy to invest and continue innovating - Stefan Batory, founder and CEO of Booksy

Why AI, Specifically

Batory has long spoken publicly about the impact of artificial intelligence on the job market and on his own industry. In earlier remarks, he admitted that the pace of AI development outstrips previous technological revolutions and that even he, as the company's CEO, feels threatened by it. Those concerns are now translating into concrete organizational decisions.

The company says it will develop AI-based self-service tools meant to take over some tasks currently handled by employees, alongside a faster rollout of automation in key processes. The staff cuts are meant to go hand in hand with a simplified organizational structure, so decisions can be made faster and with fewer layers of management.

A Success Story and Earlier Layoffs

Booksy was founded in 2014 as a Polish startup offering an app for booking appointments with hairdressers and beauty specialists. Over time, the platform evolved into a comprehensive business management tool for salons and studios, operating in dozens of markets with a particular focus on the United States. The company achieved unicorn status, raising nearly $120 million in total funding, including a Series C round of $70 million in 2021, a record for a Polish startup at the time, at a valuation of about $800 million.

This isn't the first staffing crisis in the company's history. In March 2020, amid pandemic-related lockdowns, Booksy laid off about 150 people, half of its then 300-person team, as hair and beauty salons worldwide were forced to close. The company survived and rebuilt its scale, and its co-founders later emphasized that it had reached profitability and no longer needed capital for day-to-day operations.

What It Means for Poland's AI Scene

Booksy's case fits a broader trend of tech companies attributing layoffs to the need to adapt to artificial intelligence, though in this instance the decision was announced by the founder himself rather than an outside board or investment fund. For the Polish market, it's a signal that even homegrown companies that have achieved global success and hold an established position in the US market treat process automation as part of a survival strategy, not just a cost-cutting measure.

Other companies operating in the European market have recently announced similar moves, including Germany's DeepL, which announced a roughly 25 percent workforce reduction with similar reasoning, saying that working effectively with AI requires smaller, more agile teams. Booksy thus joins the group of companies treating AI adoption not as an add-on to their existing structure but as a reason to rebuild it.

For beauty and wellness professionals in Poland and abroad who use Booksy to manage bookings, the service itself is expected to keep running unchanged for now. The key question is how quickly the promised AI-based self-service tools will be rolled out, and whether they will genuinely take over tasks currently performed by people in customer service and technical support.