Salesforce CEO Claims Half of the Company's Work Is Now Done by AI

Funny, and ironically, enough, I turned off autocorrect on iOS after it moved to a GPT-2 model because it grew increasingly inaccurate the more I used it. (The Markov chain implementation that preceded it wasn't much better, though I remember autocorrect on iOS being significantly better many years ago.)

> there’s no qualification of how much problem context the AI started from

Infer it from the article:

“as much as 30% to 50% of the company’s work is now completed by AI”

There. That’s not nothing.

You can and should call bs on all corporate claims, but this idea that coding agents at scale don’t work or is just total fluff is just wrong.

What I’m seeing is that people over 25 who like to write code and have spent their lives “perfecting” their environment and code generation process, can’t stand that businesses prefer lower quality code that’s created faster and cheaper than their “perfect” code.

Software engineers (and engineers generally) are closer economically to day laborers than theoretical physicists - but we/they refuse to believe that.

This is why unionization matters but you can’t unionize divas until they actually start losing jobs.

yeah no one is inserting into code commits "ai generated 46%"

This guy asked his 20 developers, how many of you use ai? and 10 said yes. So he does the ceo thing and tells the world 50% oh my god we can fire so many people now!

In their defense it is a pretty nice CRM.

But yeah this could probably be maintained by like five people.

Yup, Salesforce is listed and ceo needs to keep it's share price pumped.

I guess this is meant to indicate that they will lay half of their employees off. So stonks will go up, you should buy now, so stonk will go up.

This also demonstrates how meaningful this claim is

true! but all I know is that I'm seeing more and more great professionals, especially in the IT sector, being made redundant :(

Or statements like these simply tell you more about the company and the true quality of work it's doing.

The workforce is made up mostly of mediocre people who want to do as little work as possible. Management is made up mostly of short term goal seekers who want to pay as little for labor as possible. There's no slowing the train that's going down this path.

I spoke to my half-brother about this. He worked for a company up until the late 90's for almost 20 years, then got laid off. They offered him various programs to return to school and take a new career path, but he didn't want to do that, so it's really his fault. He has been bitter ever since.

I showed him this post and he had the following to say about it:

"Unless your company is a non-profit, then anything the company does is for the purpose of profit, and everything else is subordinate to that. A 'Puritan Work Ethic' culture makes people believe work has inherent value, so expressions of shared value, cohesion, culture, etc. are done to take advantage of that and convince people to work for less. So shared values and cohesion help manage salaries and wages, but if people end up not being needed, then those aren't needed."

I don't know. If AI replaces jobs, or makes most of them "copy-paste what the AI said," what is the meaning of that?

I asked him that, and he said this:

"I guess everyone's gonna have to be blue collar now or join the military."

Lots of workers would like companies to be like this, but its a prescriptive statement, not a descriptive one.

In reality, we have a system that suppresses wages to the fullest extent possible, and it is getting more and more possible. If you would like "companies" to be like this, you'll need to join with others to build the power to make that happen. This might happen via traditional union organizing, creating alternative structures like worker co-ops to compete directly in the market with the AI slop factories, or via state-level interventions. Presumably all three tactics will be necessary (and possibly some other ones I can't think of or which haven't been invented yet), since the other side has pushed us into this spot using every tool they have access to, legal or not.

It's not the 90s anymore -- we will need to get off our asses and organize if we're going to avoid the worst futures.

“Hold out baits to entice the enemy.”