Reality Is Breaking The "AI Revolution"
AI job losses are total bulls**t.
If there is one thing Marc Benioff loves, it is AI, and this lust has driven him utterly delusional. Remember when we were all snorting with laughter at Musk’s pathetic AI humanoid robot? The one so inept at even pretending to be functional that the intern teleprompting it, like a crap 90s Disney animatronic, caused it to catastrophically fail and fall on its arse by simply logging out. At the same time we were all pointing and laughing, Benioff was singing its praises, saying it could transform how businesses operate, and shared a video of him interacting with Optimus to prove it. In this video, Optimus was not just a laggy, buggy mess, but we never see it completing the painfully simple task Benioff gave it of taking him to the kitchen, so he can get a Coke, heavily suggesting it never did. Let’s not forget, it is a humanoid robot, it is meant to go to the kitchen to get you a Coke, not guide you there! You lowered the bar to the floor, and it still failed. And that was, apparently, the best thing Benioff had to back up his inane claim. Genuinely, Benioff glazes AI so hard that it feels like a perverted, delusional fetish. Which is a problem, as Benioff is the CEO of Salesforce, one of the largest customer relations companies on the planet. So, he can follow through on his perverted delusion, and last September, he did just that by firing nearly half of Salesforce’s staff and replacing them with AI. But all this did was prove how inept, manic, depraved and hollow the AI revolution, and Benioff, are.
Salesforce
Let’s start at the beginning.
As a company, Salesforce relies heavily on its staff. Most are administrators, consultants, business analysts and developers, who work closely with the likes of Amazon, Walmart and Microsoft to build and operate bespoke customer relations systems for them. Salesforce is possibly one of the most consumer-focused companies on the planet, as its entire sales pitch is optimising and navigating the highly complex and social world of business customer relations.
Back in September, Benioff announced that Salesforce had an agentic AI capable of increasing productivity so much that it was handling customer conversations at scale and was doing 50% of the work at Salesforce. This meant that they had fewer cases to worry about, and no longer needed to “actively backfill support engineer roles.” So, Benioff indiscriminately fired 4,000 of their 9,000-strong staff, as this magical AI had replaced them.
Magic, the thing which doesn’t exist and instead refers to tricking people, is the right word here because, guess what? An AI absolutely cannot replace such a socially and technically complex job, and Salesforce is only just finding that out.
Recently, senior executives at Salesforce have admitted, both internally and publicly, that they massively overestimated AI’s capabilities. They have found that AI simply can’t cope with the complex nature of customer service and totally fails at nuanced issues, escalations, and long-tail customer problems. They even say that it has caused a marked decline in service quality and far more complaints.
But the problems go far deeper than that.
Both employees and executives have said that the company is wasting countless resources on firefighting to stabilise operations since the mass AI layoff. Employees have to spend so much time stepping in to correct the wildly wrong AI-generated responses that AI is wasting more time than it saves. In other words, this AI reduces productivity, not increases it.
But there is also a huge problem here with expertise and skill debt. On top of the firefighting to correct the AI, executives have also highlighted how they are also having to firefight to stabilise their systems from problems that were previously easily solved by staff who had the required experience and skill. However, these staff were fired in the AI layoffs.
Expertise, experience and skilled employees are really hard for a company to acquire. You see, much of the expertise, experience, and skills required are unique to the company and its operations. These operations will have quirks, common problems, and unique issues that even the most experienced outsider will really struggle with, but are effortless to someone with experience within the company. As such, these attributes are not only vital, but are nurtured and grown within a company, and cannot be hired in on a whim. What Salesforce has done is chuck all this experience out the window, and now they are suffering.
To say this is a damning indictment on Benioff, his capabilities as a CEO, and his cult-like push for AI is an understatement. It demonstrates that he is dangerously ignorant, as it was painfully evident that this would happen; more on that in a minute.
Salesforce is doing a U-turn, and is “reframing its AI strategy,” shifting away from trying to replace workers, and instead doing what executives call “rebalancing.” Basically, they are trying to re-hire these critical roles and expertise they have lost, take AI out of the driver’s seat, and augment workers rather than replace them. More on why that is still a terrible idea in a minute.
Salesforce Isn’t Alone
Now, those fully-paid-up members of the “AI revolution” cult will say that this is an example of incorrect AI deployment, and an issue isolated to Salesforce. And, while I do agree that Benioff did a truly horrific job here, that isn’t true at all. You see, this ignorant AI overconfidence and dramatic deployment, followed by a rapid walk back, is happening across the entire economy.
