Those 4,000 were "customer support" positions & Salesforce just happens to also sell an AI product for customer support. They also underperformed expectations in their last earnings.
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.
> 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
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.
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.