Ayelet Knoll is sitting cross-legged on the sofa in the Appcharge office when I ask her about that Wix letter.
Avishai Abrahami had posted it publicly on X on a Thursday morning in late May — 1,000 jobs, 20% of the company, the largest cut in Wix's history.
Ayelet read it. Appcharge's open roles stayed open.
"It gave us a push," she says. "A push to make sure we don’t find ourselves in this position, and that we're actually hiring the right people for the long run."
What happened to Wix that Thursday didn't happen in isolation. Fiverr had moved earlier — in September 2025, its CEO cut 25% of the workforce in what he called a 'painful reset' to become an 'AI-first company.' Amdocs announced 3,000 roles gone the same week as Wix. Rapyd, SentinelOne, Minute Media — all within hours of each other. CTech called it Black Thursday.
The currency piece is structural and brutal. The shekel has strengthened roughly 20% against the dollar over the past year, hitting a 33-year high. For companies earning in dollars and paying salaries in shekels, Israeli engineers are now among the most expensive in the world — sometimes more costly than counterparts in Silicon Valley. Many companies had already frozen hiring before Wix made its move.
The AI piece is arguably bigger. In January, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told the World Economic Forum he thought AI could do end-to-end what software engineers do — within 12 months. More than half of all venture capital now flows to AI companies. Traditional SaaS, the model that built most of Israel's major tech companies, is getting squeezed from both sides: AI commoditises the product, and investors have moved on.
Ayelet's argument isn't that AI is overhyped, or that Appcharge is somehow insulated from what's happening. It's sharper than that.
"The AI situation has created a reality where the meaning of high-quality talent has become more important and more critical," she says. Thanks to AI, the benchmark for good work has been raised — and everyone can get there. The scarcity shifted upward. "You actually need the most talented people."
The companies cutting, in her read, had accumulated people working on products that AI can now replace adequately. Appcharge never built that way — at least not at scale. So they're not unwinding anything. They're doubling down on a different bet: that as execution gets cheaper, judgment gets more expensive.
"The number of people in a company won't grow exponentially," she says. "But the people who are there must be the strongest. Only that way can you run at a fast pace today."
This has a concrete implication for how they hire. Technical tests, she says, no longer match what the job actually requires. The process is changing from the ground up. "Today, technical tests are done — but that doesn't match what's happening. We need to understand what skillset is actually required now, and find people who are already inside the change, or who genuinely want to be."
So what does the right person look like, now that AI handles the quick and dirty?
"Quick and dirty exists by default today," Ayelet says. "The smart people of tomorrow are the ones who go deep alongside it — deeper in understanding, deeper in the question to see that nothing is missed, deeper in the analytics. Because everything can come very fast and easy. The question is whether you can still do the depth."
Curiosity, passion for the field, flexibility — those come up. But the word she keeps returning to is depth: a genuine appetite for the reasoning behind the output, for the question nobody asked yet. "People who really want to get into the core of things — because suddenly everything is much easier, and the people who'll matter are the ones who used that ease to go further, not to stop earlier."
The people who'll matter are the ones who used that ease to go further, not to stop earlier
Every senior engineer considering a move right now is doing the same calculation. They've watched what happened at Wix. They know the shekel problem hasn't gone away. At some point in a final-round conversation, they'll ask some version of the hardest question: how do I know this won't happen here? Ayelet's answer is worth quoting in full.
"First of all, I don't know. I never commit to long-term promises — because the world is crazy, the country is crazy, and there are a lot of positive changes bringing us to places we didn't know existed. What I do say is that smart, talented people find themselves in every organisation and reinvent themselves. If I've already reached this kind of conversation with someone, it's probably because I see something in them. And I really do believe that, assuming the company continues to exist — which it looks like it will — they'll probably stay. Because they're strong."
Then she adds an important caveat: "But again, we constantly need to reinvent ourselves to be relevant. That's not a given. The person across from me also needs to want to work and to prove themselves."
She's not selling security. She's offering a different proposition: come here if you want to be pushed, if you can handle not knowing, if the ambiguity is more interesting than the guarantee. The candidates who ask the right questions, she says, are the ones who flip it — instead of asking whether their job will be safe, they ask what the role needs to do to be worth the investment in 3 years. Same fear, different direction.
Before Appcharge, Ayelet spent time at an Israeli AgriTech company building AI tools for agricultural growers. The system they built was, in certain ways, a replacement for agronomists — the people who walk fields, diagnose problems, advise on what to do next.
The product worked. The harder problem was selling it.
"The first customer you need to talk to is the agronomist," she says. "Because you want him to be enthusiastic about the product. And then you're essentially asking him: help me fire you a little sooner." She pauses on that for a moment. "That's a very, very challenging problem."
They got there, she says, not by resolving the tension but by accepting the direction. No matter what happened, this was where things were going. The agronomist who got on the train became the person who knew how to work with the system better than anyone. The one who didn't became harder to place.
She doesn't draw the line to Appcharge explicitly. She doesn't need to.
Not enough people in Israeli tech are answering this question cleanly: what's actually left for humans, if AI keeps improving?
Ayelet thinks about it out loud. Depth, as she said. Taste — "ultimately someone needs to decide what to publish, what to launch, and that's all taste and experience and judgment." The ability to ask hard questions and hold a quality bar.
And then something harder to name. "As the world becomes more" – she pauses. “As you no longer know what's true, what AI wrote and what a person wrote — the places of honesty and vulnerability and authenticity, those are the places that give people a little exhale of relief. Like: okay, this is real. I want something real." She's been thinking about this in terms of Appcharge's CEO, Maor. He gave an all-hands recently and at some point he stumbled. A joke that landed slightly off, a moment of circling before he got to the thing he was trying to say. He asked Ayelet about it afterward.
"Those are your best moments" she said, “where you stumble, where your heart is there but you're going around it a little. People are with you. Because they feel it's real."
Those are your best moments — where you stumble, where your heart is there but you're going around it a little. People are with you. Because they feel it's real
She thinks about that in the context of what AI can and can't do. Maybe it gets there eventually. Maybe it learns to mimic the stumble, the circling, the moment of not-quite-having-it-yet. But right now, in this period where everything is faster and easier and slightly less trustworthy, the thing that moves people is the thing that feels genuinely unscripted.
"I don't know when AI will manage to do that," she says. For now, the stumble is still ours.
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Ayelet Knoll is Appcharge's Chief of People. Charged is Appcharge's editorial publication, covering the people and craft inside the company and beyond.
