Salesforce is at the front of this shift, with CEO Marc Benioff peddling his “Agentforce” AI tool and recently touting an AI-driven cut of 4,000 “heads” from his customer support ranks. But this didn’t entail a layoff of 4,000 workers, the company said. Inside the San Francisco tech giant, there’s now a growing effort to soften AI’s job replacement blow.
https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/salesforce-soften-blow-ai-jobs-21053239.php
Exactly, everyone talks about AI-related ki-ls like magic and something that we haven't gone through many cycles before.
At the front of what "brilliant" shift? Offshoring and near-shoring to get cheaper developers, customer support people and IT and the like? It's been done for years or decades. There's nothing new in any of this. Just because you add the word AI to something doesn't make it "at the front of this shift".
Cover up for offshoring and near-shoring more, including Latin America. That's part of the reason Salesforce's software quality is, well, the way it is, which is bad. They hire an outsourcing company in the US that then outsources the work as I said, in the likes of Latin America, so it's not direct outsourcing, there's a middleman.
It's a low-cost strategy, hire cheaper 100% strategy, quality? Not really. The developers don't have much experience. What they call senior is entry level that worked a year or two (and call it senior to charge more, which is still less than hiring in the US).
Lots' of coding issues, lots. Customers complain, account people smooth-talk the customer, nothing changes, they double down with the same. That's it and that's all.
There are a bunch of CEOs like him "messaging" the same "brilliant strategy". There's nothing to intellectualize here. It's just the above.
Ok...it may not be 4k from AI either. Lot of this is just send support jobs to contractors like cognizant in low cost countries. This just a cover for that.
But if you're in a support or account role I would be very worried