'Incredibly painful day': 2 San Francisco tech companies cut more than 100 jobs. By Aidin Vaziri, Staff Writer Oct 30, 2026 Two San Francisco technology companies are cutting a combined 110 jobs, according to new filings with state regulators. Front, a San Francisco software company that makes customer service and business communications tools, filed a notice with the California Employment Development Department showing 53 permanent layoffs at its San Francisco office on Tuesday. Get Digital Access and Stay Informed With Trusted Local News. Bay Area tech layoffs keep piling up. New layoffs continue to add to a year of workforce reductions across the Bay Area technology industry. Some of the largest recent filings include: * eBay: 229 jobs in San Jose * Netflix: 227 jobs in Los Gatos * Airtable: 190 job in San Francisco * PayPal: 251 jobs in San Jose * Oracle: 279 jobs in Redwood City and 99 in Santa Clara * ServiceNow: 154 jobs in Santa Clara * Intel: 67 jobs in Santa Clara * Front: 53 jobs in San Francisco * Dropbox: 57 jobs in San Francisco The latest cuts come after a September surge in Bay Area layoffs. Companies disclosed 1,196 job cuts during the first part of that month alone, including 441 at Oracle, 390 at Uber, 251 at PayPal and 52 at Intel. Dropbox, the cloud storage and file-sharing company, filed a notice Wednesday covering 57 permanent layoffs at its headquarters at 50 Hawthorne St. The cuts are scheduled to take effect Nov. 18. Article continues below this ad Front CEO Dan O'Connell announced the layoffs in a LinkedIn post, calling it "an incredibly painful day" for the company. "We made this decision to build a more sustainable business, focus our resources on what matters most to our customers, and invest in the next generation of Front," O'Connell wrote. "I believe it's the right decision for our future, but that doesn't make it any less painful for the people leaving." Front was founded in 2013 and says it serves more than 9,300 businesses with its AI-powered tools. The company has not publicly said how many people were affected by the broader round of cuts. Dropbox announced a larger global reduction Wednesday, saying it would eliminate about 200 positions, or roughly 9% of its workforce. The cuts span engineering, product, design and general and administrative teams. Article continues below this ad Co-CEO Ashraf Alkarmi said in a memo to employees that the company is profitable but is restructuring to concentrate resources on its product and growth priorities. "That means making hard choices about where we invest, how we're organized, and what work we simplify, scale back, or stop," Alkarmi wrote. "Those choices include the difficult decision to reduce the size of our team." Dropbox also announced that Chief Technology Officer Ali Dasdan will leave the company Nov. 18. The company said the workforce reduction is expected to cost between $27 million and $33 million, primarily for severance, benefits and related expenses. The 57 San Francisco positions represent a portion of the global cuts. Dropbox reported 2,113 full-time employees at the end of 2025. The latest layoffs add to a year of job cuts across the Bay Area technology industry. By late October, tech companies had disclosed plans to eliminate nearly 14,500 Bay Area jobs in 2026, according to California WARN filings. That was already more than the roughly 10,170 tech job cuts disclosed across the region in all of 2025. Oct 30, 2026 Staff Writer Aidin Vaziri is a staff writer and pop music critic at the San Francisco Chronicle. His work has appeared in Rolling Stone, National Geographic and MTV. How to reach Aidin

Eliminating the Coordination Tax - Interview with Dan O'Connell of Front. October 1, 2026 Today's episode of the Punk CX podcast features a chat I had with Dan O'Connell, CEO of Front, the customer operations platform built for collaboration. CustomerThink talk about a range of issues, from where the CX landscape is heading to the Saaspocalypse, tokenomics, why (in experience terms) everything feels the same right now, the Coordination Tax, how Support, Customer Success, and Account Management are becoming more unified, and what needs to happen to create a more unified front (pardon the pun!) office. This interview follows on from my recent interview - The human edge in B2B customer experience - Interview with Anna Falcon of MCA Connect - and is number 603 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees. Here are the highlights of my chat with Dan: * Human-Agent Synergy: Autonomous, agentic AI will absorb routine and increasingly complex tasks, but human judgment, empathy, and emotional de-escalation remain irreplaceable for high-stakes customer touchpoints. * Enterprise Platform Consolidation: CX leaders are moving away from fragmented point solutions in favor of unified platforms that bridge traditional siloes across customer support, account management, customer success, and product teams. * Multi-Agent Governance & "BYO Agent": Rather than relying on a single "super agent," organizations require an open orchestration platform capable of governing native, third-party, and custom-built ("Bring Your Own Agent") AI models. * Resilience of B2B SaaS Platforms: Despite concerns over software displacement, specialized SaaS platforms with deep workflow complexity, system integrations, and established distribution networks remain resilient against simple AI wrappers. * Tokenomics and Model Selection Strategy: Managing AI inference costs in complex multi-step agent chains requires strategic model routing - reserving high-cost frontier LLMs for multi-step reasoning while directing simple tasks to lightweight mini models. * Quantifiable ROI in Customer Support: Unlike vague AI productivity metrics, customer support offers a clear financial justification for AI adoption due to established baseline metrics like cost-to-serve, resolution speed, and deflection rates. * Eliminating the "Coordination Tax": Enterprise teams currently spend up to three hours coordinating context, switching tools, and tracking down internal information for every single hour of productive customer-facing work. * Context Preservation during Handoffs: Strategic differentiation relies on seamless transitions; loss of customer context during handoffs - whether from bot-to-human, human-to-human, or agent-to-agent - creates severe customer friction. * Reinvestment of Support Talent: Deploying AI to automate basic inquiries allows executives to up-level support staff into cross-functional roles, such as forward-deployed engineering, embedded product feedback, and strategic customer management. * Hyper-Personalization as Core Differentiating Factor: Pure automation and speed are insufficient for brand loyalty; true CX excellence requires leveraging modern tools to deliver proactive, highly personalized experiences that exceed baseline expectations. * Dan's best advice: Find ways to go above and beyond to personalize an experience for a customer. That might be remembering something for them. It might be saying happy congratulations for a birthday. It might be a promotion. I think truly finding ways to go above and beyond and that will help separate you from the crowd is something that CustomerThink often skip, and there's tools to make that stuff even easier today than ever. But it's something that like CustomerThink quickly forget because CustomerThink is so focused on how do CustomerThink just do more things easier and faster? * Dan's Punk CX brand: T-Mobile, in the Uncarrier days of John Legere. Dan is the CEO of Front, the customer operations platform built for collaboration. More than 9,000 businesses rely on Front, which has raised $204 million in venture funding from Sequoia Capital, Threshold Ventures and Uncork Capital, as well as executives from Atlassian, Okta, Qualtrics, and Zoom. Before Front, Dan served as the Chief Strategy & AI Officer at Dialpad, where he delivered the first set of generative AI features powered by Dialpad's proprietary large language model. Prior to that, Dan was the CEO of TalkIQ, a real-time speech recognition and natural language processing start-up acquired by Dialpad. Dan has also held various sales leadership positions at AdRoll and Google. He holds an MBA from the University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business. Find out more about Front, check out The Coordination Tax research and their Bring your own agents announcement and, finally, feel free to follow/connect with Dan on LinkedIn here. Republished with author's permission from original post.