Salesforce CEO confirms 4,000 layoffs ‘because I need less heads’ with AI - https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/02/salesforce-ceo-confirms-4000...
Though like non-GAAP earnings & adjusted EBITDA, very few care. Those that do are often old, technical, conservative & silent type of investors instead of podcasters or CNBC guests. RIP Charlie M.
Alternatively though if the market is bad and there not launching as many new products or appealing to as many new customers, customer support may be a cost center you’d force to have “AI efficiencies”
in addition SalesForce grew in employment size in 2025 AFIK and 4000 jobs are for them only around ~~5%, which means it's to small to be a meaningful metric if you don't fully trust what their press department does (and you shouldn't)
still I see people using modern AI for small productivity boosts all over the place including private live (and often with a wastely underestimate risk assessment) so in the best case it's only good enough to let people process more of the backlog (which otherwise would be discarded due to time pressure but isn't worthless) and in the worst case will lead to idk. 1/3 of people in many areas losing their job. But that is _without_ major breakthrough in AI, just based one better applying what AI already can do now :/ (and is excluding mostly physical jobs, but it's worse for some other jobs, like low skill graphic design positions)
And as software developers, it would be silly if we didn't think that businesses would love to find a way to replace us, as the software we have created did for other roles for the past 60 years.
Companies like IBM & Klarna have made news for reducing positions like these & then re-hiring them.
AI, like most tech, will increase productivity & reduce headcount but it's not there yet. Remember, the days are long & the years are short.
Customer support is the "big" thing for AI replacement but it's also the worst role to replace with an AI, since customer frustration can (and usually does) lead to spurned customers switching to competitors.
Salesforce fired 4000 humans and replaced them with a dumb chatbot that couldn't answer many questions beyond the very basic. Customers absolutely hated the chatbot and started rethinking their Salesforce spend, resulting in a number of customers reducing their spend or switching to another CRM provider entirely.
Unless all the competitors are also going the AI route for support, because they're all equally greedy.
That's basically what happened with the path from humans answering the phone to "press 1 to..." to "say 1 to...", or website chat support being replaced by non-AI bots.
I really can't see an argument against the notion that customer service has been steadily worsening as a result of companies preferring to invest less on labor.