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.
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.
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’m surprised, hacker news is not questioning this in the slightest?
Is anyone really buying they laid off 4k people _because_ they really thought they’d replace them with an LLM agent? The article is suspect at best and this doesn’t even in the slightest align with my experience with LLMs at work (it’s created more work for me).
The layoff always smelled like it was because of the economy.
weird - even if AI was literally omnipotent and omniscient, you would still be bottlenecked on human's ability to actually evaluate and verify what it is doing and reconciling that with what you wanted it to do. Unless you're of course, willing to YOLO the entire company on output you haven't actually checked yourself.
for that reason alone humans will always need to be in the loop. of course you can debate how many people you need to the above activity, but given that AI isn't omniscient, nor omnipotent I expect that number to be quite high for the foreseeable future.
one example - I've been vibe coding some stuff, and even though a pretty comprehensive set of tests are passing, I still end up reading all of the code. if I'm being honest some of the decisions the AI makes are a bit opaque to me so I end up spending a bunch of time asking it why (of course there's no real ego there, but bare with me...), re-reading the code, thinking about whether that actually makes sense. I personally prefer this activity/mode since the tests pass (which were written by the AI too), and I know anything I manually change can be tested, but it's not something I could just submit to prod right away. this is just a MVP. I can't imagine delegating if real money/customers were on the line without even more scrutiny.
>you would still be bottlenecked on human's ability to actually evaluate and verify what it is doing and reconciling that with what you wanted it to do.
this sort of assumes that most humans actually know what they want to do.
It is very untrue in my experience.
Its like most complaints I hear about AI art. yes, it is generic and bland. just like 90% of what human artists produce.
>weird - even if AI was literally omnipotent and omniscient, you would still be bottlenecked on human's ability to actually evaluate and verify what it is doing and reconciling that with what you wanted it to do.
one would hope that one ability of an 'omniscient and omnipotent' AI would be greater understanding.
When speaking of the divine (the only typical example of the omniscient and omnipotent that comes to mind) we never consider what happens when God (or whoever) misunderstands our intent -- we just rely on the fact that an All-Being type thing would just know.
I think the understanding of minute intent is one such trait an omniscient and omnipotent system must have.
p.s. what a bar raise -- we used to just be happy with AGI!
Move fast and break things. When a black box can be blamed, why care about quality? What we need is EXTREMELY strict liability on harms done by AIs and other black box processes. If a company adopts a black box, that should be considered reckless behavior until proven otherwise. Taking humans out of the loop is a conscious decision they make therefore they should be fully responsible for any mistakes or harms that result.
fair. I used to think that too, but I find at least for golang, the soda models right tests way faster than I would be able to. tdd is actually really possible with ai imo. except of course you get the scaffolding implementation (I haven't figured out a way to get models to write tests in a way that ensures the tests actually do something useful without an implementation).
> even if AI was literally omnipotent and omniscient, you would still be bottlenecked on human's ability to actually evaluate and verify what it is doing and reconciling that with what you wanted it to do
no no no you don't get it, you would have ANOTHER AI for that
It's not even about humans "needing" to be in the loop, but that humans "want" to be in the loop. AI is like a genius employee who has no ego and no desire to rise up the ranks, forever a peon while more willful colleagues surpass them in the hierarchy.
Until AI gets ego and will of its own (probably the end of humanity) it will simply be a tool, regardless of how intelligent and capable it is.
Humans need to be in the loop for the same reason other humans peer review humans pull requests: we all fuck up. And AI makes just as many mistakes as humans do. They just do so significantly quicker.
It is impossible to verify anything in this article. For example "In recent internal discussions and public remarks". Where are these public remarks? How did this author get access to internal discussions? I rate this article as clickbait nonsense.
What is this site? maarthandam.com? Is it a blog? An AI generated “newspaper”? An internet Newspaper? The menu doesn’t work on mobile, no articles appear to have a by-line, and there’s no link to outside sources to indicate the provenance of these quotes.
For an AI agent to do a good job at customer support, you would need to
1. literally document everything in the product and keep documentation up to date (could be partially automated?)
2. Build good enough search to find those things
3. Be able to troubleshoot / reason / abstract beyond those facts
4. Handle customer information that goes against the assumptions in the core set of facts (ie customers find bugs or don’t understand fundamental concepts about computers)
5. Be prepared to restart the entire conversation when the customer gets frustrated with 1-4 (this is very annoying)
> declining service quality, higher complaint volumes, and internal firefighting
LLMs are a great technology for making up plausible looking text. When correctness matters, and you don't have a second system that can reliably check it, the output turns out to be unreliable.
When you're dealing with customer support, everyone involved has already been failed by the regular system. So they're an exception, and they're unhappy. So you really don't want to inflict a second mistake on them.
Salesforce is B2B and a complex software. I wouldn’t expected them to layoff that much support. Surprising. They should be empowering their support staff with AI tools to improve customer experiences.
Though I’m a bit surprised they have that much support staff.
every single HN comment on these articles makes me doubt both the sentience of my fellow nerds and whether there are any actual human users of this website remaining.
I'm aware that "what does Salesforce actually do?" is a joke but I also really don't know what they do and this article didn't help. They... have conversations with customers? What does the AI do?
They make hideously complicated software to help businesses manage their business. You need consultants to help integrate it and to make any changes to it. The interfaces are convoluted and require learning how they work rather than having any kind of discoverability. Switching to their systems often involves a dip in customer satisfaction. Switching off of their systems is nearly impossible by design.
A big chunk of it is like an enterprisey, old TwentyCRM. It connects with everything, and nobody got fired for choosing salesforce. And the decision makers all play golf together.
Executive compensation is justified by "...enormous impact leadership decisions have on company outcomes..." yet when those decisions blow up spectacularly, the accountability somehow evaporates.
If your pay is 400 times average employee salary because of your unique strategic vision, surely firing 4000 people based on faulty assumptions should come with proportional consequences?
Or does the high risk, high reward, philosophy only apply to the reward part?
We all know the answer. There is no actual defense of inflated CEO salaries. It’s just the people in power maintaining their power and always has been.
> “We assumed the technology was further along than it actually was,” one executive said privately, reflecting a growing recognition that AI performance in controlled demonstrations did not translate cleanly into real-world customer environments
Yes this reads like vacuous AI slop and and the **randomly bolded** text everywhere is a **dead giveaway**. At this point it's becoming a stronger signal than em-dashes.
And when they can't undo their mistake will they accept the consequences, or will they cry to the government that there are no workers available to do the jobs so national policy must be modified to give Salesforce an even larger firehose of candidates to ignore? Companies complain endlessly that there isn't a huge stable of unicorns for them pick and choose from but those 4000 experienced staff were known good workers and they dumped them anyway to chase fantasies. Salesforce will demand the government fix their mistake for them. The larger the company, the more they expect to never have to pay for their mistakes.
In this case I think it came from the very top down — Benioff has been very bullish on AI and they’ve pretty much re-branded behind their Agent Force offerings.
Also probably a part of their go-to-market strategy. If they can prove it internally they can sell it externally.
Yeah I can't see a source for the internal admissions of regret.
If we take out the AI part of this and treat it like any other project, if what they admit is true, it represents a massive failure of judgement and implementation.
I can't see anyone admitting that in public, as it would probably end their career, or should do at least. Especially if a company is a "meritocracy"
Competent management would have implemented a trial run to evaluate the feasibility of the plan. These sociopaths ensured their own failure by lunging for the prize without realizing they stepped off a cliff.
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.
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
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 the OP was being sarcastic there...
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'd say "cowardly" not "brave".
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...
I’m surprised, hacker news is not questioning this in the slightest?
Is anyone really buying they laid off 4k people _because_ they really thought they’d replace them with an LLM agent? The article is suspect at best and this doesn’t even in the slightest align with my experience with LLMs at work (it’s created more work for me).
The layoff always smelled like it was because of the economy.
The article also reads like it was written with a chatbot.
weird - even if AI was literally omnipotent and omniscient, you would still be bottlenecked on human's ability to actually evaluate and verify what it is doing and reconciling that with what you wanted it to do. Unless you're of course, willing to YOLO the entire company on output you haven't actually checked yourself.
for that reason alone humans will always need to be in the loop. of course you can debate how many people you need to the above activity, but given that AI isn't omniscient, nor omnipotent I expect that number to be quite high for the foreseeable future.
one example - I've been vibe coding some stuff, and even though a pretty comprehensive set of tests are passing, I still end up reading all of the code. if I'm being honest some of the decisions the AI makes are a bit opaque to me so I end up spending a bunch of time asking it why (of course there's no real ego there, but bare with me...), re-reading the code, thinking about whether that actually makes sense. I personally prefer this activity/mode since the tests pass (which were written by the AI too), and I know anything I manually change can be tested, but it's not something I could just submit to prod right away. this is just a MVP. I can't imagine delegating if real money/customers were on the line without even more scrutiny.
>you would still be bottlenecked on human's ability to actually evaluate and verify what it is doing and reconciling that with what you wanted it to do.
this sort of assumes that most humans actually know what they want to do.
It is very untrue in my experience.
Its like most complaints I hear about AI art. yes, it is generic and bland. just like 90% of what human artists produce.
>weird - even if AI was literally omnipotent and omniscient, you would still be bottlenecked on human's ability to actually evaluate and verify what it is doing and reconciling that with what you wanted it to do.
one would hope that one ability of an 'omniscient and omnipotent' AI would be greater understanding.
When speaking of the divine (the only typical example of the omniscient and omnipotent that comes to mind) we never consider what happens when God (or whoever) misunderstands our intent -- we just rely on the fact that an All-Being type thing would just know.
I think the understanding of minute intent is one such trait an omniscient and omnipotent system must have.
p.s. what a bar raise -- we used to just be happy with AGI!
That’s because gods are a mythical/supernatural invention. No technology can ever really be omniscient or omnipotent. It will always have limitations.
In reality, even an ASI will not know your intent unless you communicate it clearly and unambiguously.
Move fast and break things. When a black box can be blamed, why care about quality? What we need is EXTREMELY strict liability on harms done by AIs and other black box processes. If a company adopts a black box, that should be considered reckless behavior until proven otherwise. Taking humans out of the loop is a conscious decision they make therefore they should be fully responsible for any mistakes or harms that result.
I've always found it much quicker to just... do the work myself. AI slows me down more than anything.
fair. I used to think that too, but I find at least for golang, the soda models right tests way faster than I would be able to. tdd is actually really possible with ai imo. except of course you get the scaffolding implementation (I haven't figured out a way to get models to write tests in a way that ensures the tests actually do something useful without an implementation).
> even if AI was literally omnipotent and omniscient, you would still be bottlenecked on human's ability to actually evaluate and verify what it is doing and reconciling that with what you wanted it to do
no no no you don't get it, you would have ANOTHER AI for that
It's not even about humans "needing" to be in the loop, but that humans "want" to be in the loop. AI is like a genius employee who has no ego and no desire to rise up the ranks, forever a peon while more willful colleagues surpass them in the hierarchy.
Until AI gets ego and will of its own (probably the end of humanity) it will simply be a tool, regardless of how intelligent and capable it is.
Humans need to be in the loop for the same reason other humans peer review humans pull requests: we all fuck up. And AI makes just as many mistakes as humans do. They just do so significantly quicker.
This is the opposite of both what the article is saying, and reality
Yes, "Mecha-hitler" has no aspirations. /s
It is impossible to verify anything in this article. For example "In recent internal discussions and public remarks". Where are these public remarks? How did this author get access to internal discussions? I rate this article as clickbait nonsense.
What is this site? maarthandam.com? Is it a blog? An AI generated “newspaper”? An internet Newspaper? The menu doesn’t work on mobile, no articles appear to have a by-line, and there’s no link to outside sources to indicate the provenance of these quotes.
one shotted vibe coded blog
Regrets that the cost-benefit analysis didn't work out, not that they fired anyone.
I bounced out of this article pretty quick after seeing it was generated by AI.
The senior leadership are accountable here. I assume none of them held themselves to task.
“Mistakes were made.”
For an AI agent to do a good job at customer support, you would need to
1. literally document everything in the product and keep documentation up to date (could be partially automated?)
2. Build good enough search to find those things
3. Be able to troubleshoot / reason / abstract beyond those facts
4. Handle customer information that goes against the assumptions in the core set of facts (ie customers find bugs or don’t understand fundamental concepts about computers)
5. Be prepared to restart the entire conversation when the customer gets frustrated with 1-4 (this is very annoying)
> declining service quality, higher complaint volumes, and internal firefighting
LLMs are a great technology for making up plausible looking text. When correctness matters, and you don't have a second system that can reliably check it, the output turns out to be unreliable.
When you're dealing with customer support, everyone involved has already been failed by the regular system. So they're an exception, and they're unhappy. So you really don't want to inflict a second mistake on them.
Sauce https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/aft...
This site have zero reputation.
Probably the first time I'm saying this, but this site appears heavily AI written.
What swe would want to work there after reading this.
Salesforce is B2B and a complex software. I wouldn’t expected them to layoff that much support. Surprising. They should be empowering their support staff with AI tools to improve customer experiences.
Though I’m a bit surprised they have that much support staff.
Customer experience is secondary to making the C-suite more money.
Public company logic:
Firing people = smart cost cutting
Hiring people = strong vote of confidence in continued growth
every single HN comment on these articles makes me doubt both the sentience of my fellow nerds and whether there are any actual human users of this website remaining.
I'm aware that "what does Salesforce actually do?" is a joke but I also really don't know what they do and this article didn't help. They... have conversations with customers? What does the AI do?
They make hideously complicated software to help businesses manage their business. You need consultants to help integrate it and to make any changes to it. The interfaces are convoluted and require learning how they work rather than having any kind of discoverability. Switching to their systems often involves a dip in customer satisfaction. Switching off of their systems is nearly impossible by design.
Sounds like SAP
A big chunk of it is like an enterprisey, old TwentyCRM. It connects with everything, and nobody got fired for choosing salesforce. And the decision makers all play golf together.
We use it as basically a customer-facing bug tracker, except it's absolute garbage even compared to stuff like Jira.
Maybe where AI needs to take over is at the CEO level.
Executive compensation is justified by "...enormous impact leadership decisions have on company outcomes..." yet when those decisions blow up spectacularly, the accountability somehow evaporates.
If your pay is 400 times average employee salary because of your unique strategic vision, surely firing 4000 people based on faulty assumptions should come with proportional consequences?
Or does the high risk, high reward, philosophy only apply to the reward part?
We all know the answer. There is no actual defense of inflated CEO salaries. It’s just the people in power maintaining their power and always has been.
But have they hired anyone back?
Why would they, “AI” will be much better in 6 months!
> “We assumed the technology was further along than it actually was,” one executive said privately, reflecting a growing recognition that AI performance in controlled demonstrations did not translate cleanly into real-world customer environments
stop. reading. evals.
Is it just me or anyone else see that this article has no real references to its claims and the articles look like AI slop.
Yes this reads like vacuous AI slop and and the **randomly bolded** text everywhere is a **dead giveaway**. At this point it's becoming a stronger signal than em-dashes.
And when they can't undo their mistake will they accept the consequences, or will they cry to the government that there are no workers available to do the jobs so national policy must be modified to give Salesforce an even larger firehose of candidates to ignore? Companies complain endlessly that there isn't a huge stable of unicorns for them pick and choose from but those 4000 experienced staff were known good workers and they dumped them anyway to chase fantasies. Salesforce will demand the government fix their mistake for them. The larger the company, the more they expect to never have to pay for their mistakes.
> the company overestimated AI’s readiness for real-world deployment
The root problem is they /estimated/.
> “We assumed the technology was further along than it actually was,” one executive said privately
... and /assumed/.
Testing? Field trials? Phased deployment?
No, someone just wanted their bonus for being forward-thinking, paradigm-shifting, opex cutters. I'm sure they got it.
In this case I think it came from the very top down — Benioff has been very bullish on AI and they’ve pretty much re-branded behind their Agent Force offerings.
Also probably a part of their go-to-market strategy. If they can prove it internally they can sell it externally.
And there will be no consequences for those who made these decisions.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42639532
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42639791
This is a misread of Benioff's intent behind his comment lol.
Salesforce has a vested interest in maintaing its seat based licenses, so it's not in favor of mass layoffs.
Internally Salesforce is pushing AgentForce full stop
This all feels staged somehow. It feels like some kind of performative BS that I can't quite put my finger on.
what is the source for this? seems like a random blog?
Yeah I can't see a source for the internal admissions of regret.
If we take out the AI part of this and treat it like any other project, if what they admit is true, it represents a massive failure of judgement and implementation.
I can't see anyone admitting that in public, as it would probably end their career, or should do at least. Especially if a company is a "meritocracy"
Competent management would have implemented a trial run to evaluate the feasibility of the plan. These sociopaths ensured their own failure by lunging for the prize without realizing they stepped off a cliff.