Anyone finding that they just don't NEED to add more Employees anymore? (I will not promote)

A friend of mine who was looking for work asked me if we were hiring and I responded "You know, it's weird but all of our growth goals don't seem to map back to hiring people anymore."

This isn't about the economy or growth goals. It's a really fascinating shift in focus and costs for startups.

My gut reaction is that I HATE the idea of not creating more jobs.

In my career I've hired thousands of people, and I've always prided myself on job creation. We just sold a company that employed 200 people last year, and I'm proud of the work we were able to create.

What's interesting is that I simply don't feel like we NEED to like we used to.

As we're looking at all of our growth goals, for the first time I'm not assigning FTEs to them. Nearly everything we're doing is actually reducing the need for more humans, not adding them - and we're not even trying to reduce the need. Obviously the timing of AI has had a major impact.

Product - Our team is shipping more code than ever before, and even our designers who have never touched code are shipping final code. If we doubled the size of the team, it would make no difference (this is a big deal considering the historical cost here).

Marketing - So many aspects of our marketing are getting automated and streamlined, to the point where even a single FTE can create a massive amount of reach across channels.

Support - Our Success team is able to effectively respond to tickets in a fraction of the time, which essentially doubles their capacity without adding any more staff.

Management - With less staff we need less managers, which are a big expense, but it also means reporting and decisions are more streamlined, which is a positive. But it also means those positions simply don't get created like they used to.

I think this is a big deal for the younger startups because it translates into needing less capital (or none!) which provides for more ownership and agency. Clearly we still need some folks to build out the core team, but that's very different than a massive staffing line item.

Anyone else here finding the same trend? Opposite? I don't have a strong opinion either way, but I'd love to hear how other Founders are processing this.