Two fucking months ago, Marc Benioff was on stage talking about how AI layoffs were just "scary narratives" that weren't grounded in reality. Fast forward to Friday's Logan Bartlett Show, and there he is bragging about cutting 4,000 customer service jobs because his AI agents are so damn good at their jobs.
"I've reduced it from 9,000 head to about 5,000 because I need less heads," Benioff said with the enthusiasm of someone who's never had to worry about a paycheck. Classic CEO move: promise one thing, do the opposite when the numbers look good. Tech layoffs continue are hitting customer service roles particularly hard across the industry.
The numbers tell the real story. Salesforce had over 100 million leads that went uncalled in 26 years because they didn't have enough people. Now their agentic sales system calls back 10,000 leads per week automatically. The AI handles about half of all customer chats now. Humans get the angry customers and weird problems that break the AI.
But here's what really pisses me off - Benioff called this period "eight of the most exciting months of my career." Easy to be excited when you're not one of the 4,000 people wondering how they'll pay rent next month. The guy runs San Francisco's largest private employer (76,000 people worldwide) and treats worker displacement like it's a fucking game of SimCity.
The remaining humans handle the weird edge cases while AI bots deal with everything else. It's the classic "AI will augment human workers" bullshit that really means "AI will replace human workers, but we'll call it augmentation to sound nice."
Every other company with a customer service department just saw their CFO pull up a spreadsheet. The robots work nights, weekends, and holidays without bitching. They don't need health insurance or bathroom breaks. This isn't just Salesforce - it's the blueprint for what's coming everywhere. Contact center automation is projected to replace millions of jobs by 2027.