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Comment by nick__m | Hacker News Reader

《 And then, we will have less support engineers next year because we have an agentic layer. We will have more salespeople next year because we really need to explain to people exactly the value that we can achieve with AI. So, we will probably add another 1,000 to 2,000 salespeople in the short term.” 》

I guess they are building a saleforce at the expense of everything else !

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"Here's an AI Agentforce that can do all your sales for you!"

"We have to hire thousands of salespeople to sell this AI agent"

Something doesn't compute

They are probably struggling to keep sales number up, they need more sales and cut costs. So makes sense to hire more sales people and freeze development… but that’s a sad story, let’s fix that sad story with AI:

AI is so good that everything can be automated, except for sales which needs a personal touch.

Wall Street happy, bonus for all execs, the end.

> we really need to explain to people exactly the value that we can achieve with AI

This feels like one of those things where you're having to explain things so hard that it should give you a clue you're duping yourself. People don't get it? We just need more salespeople to explain it more. Gotta keep those KPIs up.

The funny thing is you can’t hide how bad this shit is because at some point everybody who doesn’t have a personal assistant has to deal with customer support of some sort.

And holy fucking shit has AI made every single interaction with a company ten times more painful and time consuming. It’s the worlds most boring video game where you had to trigger the right sequence of words with some dumb robot, only then to get placed into a queue of one of five remaining humans who themselves are just reading a script.

The other day I had to beat the first barricade of AI chat to get in the human queue, and then it took them literally five hours to reply. I got a text at 1am.

There is nobody who when connected to some AI agent thinks “great this will solve my problems quickly!” It’s just “wow they figured out a new way to screw us”.

90% of users have silly questions, which is why all customer support conversations start with "have you tried restarting your router" and "is electricity working in your area". AI chatbots are completely fine for those 90% users who have such simple requests, but they're indeed a nightmare for the 10% who can do basic troubleshooting steps on their own and need support with more advanced questions. Nobody cares though, because we're 10%

Is there any data to back this up?

Believing you are smarter than 90% of people is the “data”.

You do realize there are other reasons to need service than tech support right? Like having to fight an insurance company to get the life saving medical care you pay them thousands of dollars for?

Somehow their "agent" AI can't do sales? Can't run email/call scripts? Can't track things in their own CRM?

Huh. So they are telling customers that they'll make their work more AI driven while staffing up their own human sales?

Do their customers value sales more than engineering? It seems like a self-consistent pitch if so.

Let's assume they do. They value sales, they believe Salesforce's pitch that the SF AI will reduce their sales cost.

Yet Salesforce themselves is hiring more people vs simply dogfooding their own AI agents.

Engineers aren't hot chicks that show up with sandwiches.

Put in AI to justify saving on support staff. Then hire more people to convince customers the AI is actually just as good as speaking to a real human...

It feels like mixed messaging about whether AI is actually good.

The classic tell, don't show.

If they really wanted to back it, they'd use AI salespeople.

Classic solution in search of a problem thinking. "It's not that our solution isn't wanted, our customers just need to get it!"

An LLM can't explain the value of Salesforce?

Not until it can take you out for steaks, booze, and strippers.

Sadly status quo of the vast majority of enterprise software companies, at least after growth starts to flatten out.

That is that capitalist dream—all sales, no production expenses.

Ideally there would be no sales expenses either

Wouldn’t my business AI agent automatically talk with the salesforce AI agent and buy it automatically?

Why would you need buyers or even sellers? Why even have humans in the loop at all for any business process or transaction.

My understanding from all the magazines at my dentist office is that AI will replace the whole thing.

What’s even the point of humans? It’s just AI bots jerking each other off all the way down!

…now my head hurts.

There is no point in having humans, ideally we should end up with just Elon Musk and fully automated resource extraction and entertaining infrastructure to please him /s

They never seem to talk about what happens when the the dream is ubiquitously realized and nobody is left to buy whatever it they are selling because their production expenses fund someone else's sales.

At least it will be interesting to see which pushes civilization off the cliff first, end-game capitalism ouroborosing itself or the direct impact of climate change (which is obviously also related in any case).

>They never seem to talk about what happens when the the dream is ubiquitously realized and nobody is left to buy whatever it they are selling because their production expenses fund someone else's sales.

"If we replace 95% percent of farmers with tractors, who's going to buy all the food that's being grown?"

I'm guessing your intended subtext is something like: "eliminating jobs isn't bad or permanent since new kinds of jobs may be created elsewhere", but I don't think this satire/analogy works well.

Historically speaking farmers didn't buy much food to start with, since they already had it or traded locally with their neighbors. It was everybody else (e.g. city artisans) who bought food, and they have kept buying it because all humans need to eat regardless of where--or whether--they are employed.

Since bayarearefugee is talking about a scenario where the "dream is ubiquitously realized", that implies any new future job-categories are also eliminated. No jobs for repairing the foreman-bots that direct the repair-bots.

There will always be jobs even if production increasing workers arent needed. If the capital owners can create massive wealth without labor they will always be willing to part with some of it to have concubines, personal chefs, chess trainers for their children, gladiators or whatever other nonsense gets their rocks off.

Not really a clever observation on your part, this is the trite response everyone trots out but where it fails is in scope. We aren't talking about replacing 95% of a particular job (which has happened many times in the past over a long period of time), we are talking about replacing 95% of all people (in a relatively short period of time).

And on top of that situation, we are also demanding unlimited growth. Good luck with that.

More like "If 93% of people only have 7% of the wealth, and 12 guys have the 93% of wealth, how are we going to sell anything?!"

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