Chirantan Desai on AI impact on hiring
From Agents in the Enterprise with MongoDB | Interrupt 26 · · LangChain and MongoDB
“We are only signing one-year contracts. Because this old seat-based model — I mean, you see what's going on right now. Investors ask me, 'Hey CJ, are you going to do layoffs at MongoDB?' I mean, it's an offensive question on multiple fronts. But the thing is — how many more people do we need to hire? We just don't know — with AI productivity gains as we build out agents and so on.”
On , Chirantan Desai, President, Chief Executive Officer & Director at MongoDB Inc., spoke about AI impact on hiring during Agents in the Enterprise with MongoDB | Interrupt 26 on LangChain and MongoDB.
About Chirantan Desai
Chirantan "CJ" Desai, who became CEO of MongoDB six months ago, has been speaking at several events about the company's role in the AI era. At the Interrupt 2026 conference, Desai said that large enterprises' prediction that 2025 would be the year to create agents at scale "didn't pan out to be true," though he noted that technologies around observability and harnesses are maturing in 2026. He described coding assistants as the current "killer use case" for AI in enterprises. Desai also stated that MongoDB is only signing one-year contracts, citing uncertainty around hiring needs due to AI productivity gains, and said that 70% of code checked in at his company was written by a coding assistant. At MongoDB.local London 2026, Desai argued that the data layer "will not be commoditized" and has been "the only constant" through technological transformations. He described MongoDB as a unified platform integrating text search, vector search, and transactional data for building agents. Desai expressed skepticism about seat-based pricing models, advocating for consumption-based or outcome-based pricing instead. He also discussed the importance of multi-cloud resiliency, noting that most hyperscalers experienced major outages in 2025. Desai said that companies must either use AI to create new products or reinvent themselves on AI-first principles, and that simply rebranding as an AI company "does not work."