I wrote about this a few weeks ago in a piece titled AI Isn’t Cutting Developer Jobs, It’s Just Changing What We Do (25.11.2025). At the time, the dominant narrative was already clear: AI would automate knowledge work at scale, companies would trim teams, and productivity gains would neatly replace human labor. Since then, reality has been less tidy. Yes, there have been job cuts, and yes, AI is deeply reshaping how work gets done but not in the clean, linear way many tech companies seemed to expect.
Sources / Further Reading
– Slashdot (Sept 1, 2025): Coverage of Marc Benioff’s comments on reducing Salesforce support headcount following the rollout of AI agents.
– The Economic Times (Dec 23, 2025): Reporting on Salesforce executives acknowledging declining confidence in large language models and a shift toward more predictable automation.
– Salesforce Newsroom (Nov–Dec 2025): Official posts outlining Salesforce’s transition toward deterministic, data-first AI systems.
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The part that resonates is the displacement of complexity. In most orgs, that complexity doesn’t disappear - it migrates into governance, monitoring, and exception handling.
AI-first often looks efficient at the executive layer because failure costs aren’t visible yet. But once probabilistic systems hit real workflows, the oversight surface expands slowly.
The org doesn’t get smaller. It gets differently structured.
Thank you for such a balanced take on the Salesforce situation. I absolutely think that a data-first approach is sustainable and effective. I think the problem with Salesforce is that they got rid of a lot of their institutional knowledge, which would be very difficult for them to buy back.