On Sunday (12 October), Sridhar Vembu, the co-founder of Zoho, wrote a short post on X. Zoho is a big software company from India. Many people here know it for its business apps.
What he said, in short: the software business looks uncertain right now. AI has pushed costs up a lot. He said server prices for their data centres have gone up four times, and AI usage is growing fast, so the bills are much higher. So Zoho cut its marketing budget, and staff will not get their usual pay rise this year. He said he had apologised to his people for this. He also said they will work hard to avoid mass layoffs, they have not grown headcount for 18 months, and the next 3 to 5 years will decide if their “reinvention” works. He ended with “Please pray for us.”
Source: CNBC TV18 and The Indian Express.
What I noticed first
I read it twice. Not because of the pay freeze. Pay freezes happen. What stopped me was the tone. No big words. No “strategic realignment”. Just: this is hard, this is what we did, I am sorry, thank you.
I work in tech sales. I have read a lot of company messages over the years. Most of them are written so nobody can be blamed. You finish reading and you still do not know what happened. This one was the opposite. You might not like the news, but you know where you stand.
The part nobody talks about
We hear a lot about AI making things cheaper and faster. And in some ways it does. But this story shows the other side. Someone has to pay for the servers. Someone has to pay for every question we type into these tools. For a company like Zoho, that bill is now big enough to touch people’s salaries.
I came into sales from a technical background, so I like to look at what is under the hood. When customers talk to me about AI, the first question is usually “what can it do?” More and more I think the better question is “what will it cost to run, every month, for years?” In public sector, where budgets are fixed and every pound is checked, this matters a lot. A tool that looks cheap in the demo can look very different in year two.
Tough years and how I try to handle them
I have had years where the money was not what I hoped. Not because I did a bad job, but because the market moved. I think most people in tech have had one of those years by now.
What helped me was keeping a few things simple:
I keep my morning routine. Gym first, then the school run. It sounds small, but on bad weeks it is the part of the day I still control.
I separate the company’s year from my own year. The company can have a bad year and I can still learn something, build better relationships with customers, and get sharper at my job. Those things come with me wherever I go.
I do not treat work as family. I like my colleagues and I care about my customers. But a company is a company. When a company has to choose, it will choose the business. That is not cruel, it is just how it works. Knowing this makes me calmer, not more bitter. My family is at home, and on the football pitch on training nights.
What I would want from a leader
If my company ever had to say something like this, I would want it said the way Vembu said it. Plain words. The real reason. An apology if one is needed. And a clear line on what they are trying to protect, in his case jobs.
People can handle bad news. What they find hard is confusing news, or news that arrives late. I think about this with my own customers too. If a delivery is going to slip, or a price is going to change, the earlier and simpler I say it, the better the relationship is after.
My honest take
I do not know if Zoho’s bet will work. Nobody does. Maybe in three years we will look back and say they were smart to save cash early. Maybe not.
But I respect the way he told it. And it was a good reminder for me that the AI change is not only about new features. It is about money, people and hard choices. The best I can do is stay useful, stay honest with my customers, and keep my own routine steady while the industry works itself out.
That is my note for this week.
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