Sales has always been more of a face to face type of job even for remote meetings. Do you really think Larry would try to replace us with AI or cut down on us? Less sales less profits.
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The sales org was hit hard on March 31.
I'm not going to say what product line I'm in, but I'm a US based SE. Around Feb/March of this year, myself and 2 of my peers were called into a zoom meeting with some clown on the AI Team. He was trying to build an AI model of the questions that we ask as we architect a solution for our customers. He said it would be used as the first point of contact for customers, alleviating the "Burdon" on us of having to do the initial discovery.
We all laughed (inside), did as little as possible to cooperate, and so far his little project has not taken off. That's the whole point of discovery - asking questions, getting to know the problems the customer is facing, and then coming up with a solution. I'm not ordering lunch at Panera, I'm order complicated technical products!
Larry has always been dissatisfied with the high cost of sales. One of the goals of OCI was always to make provisioning easy enough for customers or prospective customers to manage everything themselves. Now add AI to the mix and sales/solution engineering (or whatever fancy title they have nowadays) is no longer required.
US Solutions Sales engineers are going to be replaced.
That's fine if you want to believe that.
I don't have evidence, but I believe Sales staff will be RIF'd only based on individual performance and product line, but on the flip side, circumstances will be very hard for Sales people to thrive.