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Comment by JoeAltmaier | Hacker News Reader

Somebody has to be the brave experimenter that tries the new thing. I'm just glad it was these folk. Since they make no tangible product and contribute nothing to society, they were perhaps the optimal choice to undergo these first catastrophic failed attempts at AI business.

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While someone does have to be the first to experiment I think you've implied a bit of a false dichotomy here. Experimentation can be good for sure, but it also doesn't have to involve such extremes. Sucks for the people left who now have to make up for the fact that someone's experiment didn't work out so well.

I think that as an employee it’s good to have a clear failure case study to point to from a large and credible organisation that this idea your boss has to fire everyone and just LLM everything isn’t going to work the way you expect it to.

The more examples of this going badly we can get together the better.

I think the OP was being sarcastic there...

There's always someone that reads it and replies with a straight face.

I think it was mostly a branding exercise, Salesforce wanted to signal to its customers that they are on top of this whole AI thing and there is no need to go to some unknown AI startup to "AIfy" their business. So they wanted to capitalize on FOMO / fear of being disrupted while using a bad labor market to improve profitability. They succeeded in this and made news around the world, but maybe not so many new customers.

Makes no sense - why would Salesforce's customers care if the company is using AI or not, other than when it impacts them (the customer) such as worse customer service.

This just seems a poor decision made by C-suite folk who were neither AI-savvy enough to understand the limits of the tech, nor smart enough to run a meaningful trial to evaluate it. A failure of wishful thinking over rational evaluation.

I figured the messaging is target more at investors than customers

If you consider the extent to which our economy has become financialized, then you see these decisions have little to do with providing a product for customers but rather a stock for investors.

The product is the press release.

I need to talk to Jim, where is Jim?

It was signaling to Wall Street and the rest of the tech industry. They want to be seen as profit focused and innovation driven.

they contribute very little except of course that without jobs their products have created 14.8647% of US population would starve to death. HN seems like a perfect place where people upvote stupid shit like some of the most successful companies in the history of mankind contributing nothing to society. bravo!! :)

A bold statement. Who knew so many US citizen owed their food to an internet company! And not even Google or Amazon. Seems a reach, by maybe two or three decimal places.

Boom, roasted.

Agree on broad strokes, but slack is a useful product.

They didn't create Slack, they just bought it.

Sure. However, the hiccup that salesforce faces will affect slack usage.

Salesforce the crm not slack

Most disastrous non intuitive UI ever seen...

ever tried teams?

Teams is confusing but Slack is gaslighting...

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