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Salesforce regrets firing 4000 experienced staff and replacing them with AI
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- chrisjj 10mo ago> 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/.
- toomuchtodo 10mo agoAnd there will be no consequences for those who made these decisions. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42639532 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42639532 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42639791 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42639791
- chrisjj 10mo agoPerhaps. Unless people wise up to the fact what's destroying jobs here isn't "Artificial Intelligence". It is simply natural stupidity.
- imglorp 10mo agoTesting? Field trials? Phased deployment? No, someone just wanted their bonus for being forward-thinking, paradigm-shifting, opex cutters. I'm sure they got it.
- mstank 10mo agoIn 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.
- JoeAltmaier 10mo agoSomebody 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.
- pama 10mo agoAgree on broad strokes, but slack is a useful product.
- JohnTHaller 10mo agoThey didn't create Slack, they just bought it.
- pama 10mo agoSure. However, the hiccup that salesforce faces will affect slack usage.
- brianwawok 10mo agoSalesforce the crm not slack
- belter 10mo agoMost disastrous non intuitive UI ever seen...
- scsh 10mo ago
- foolswisdom 10mo agoProbably the first time I'm saying this, but this site appears heavily AI written.
- Throaway198712 10mo agoRegrets that the cost-benefit analysis didn't work out, not that they fired anyone.
- bhewes 10mo agoBut have they hired anyone back?
- nottorp 10mo agoWhy would they, “AI” will be much better in 6 months!
- nobodyandproud 10mo agoThe senior leadership are accountable here. I assume none of them held themselves to task.
- justin66 10mo ago“Mistakes were made.”
- edgineer 10mo agoI'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?
- JohnTHaller 10mo agoThey 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.
- mr_mitm 10mo agoSounds like SAP
- rwmj 10mo agoWe use it as basically a customer-facing bug tracker, except it's absolute garbage even compared to stuff like Jira.
- sergiotapia 10mo agoA 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.
- cons0le 10mo agoIn 2025, the most profitable companies are ones where nobody knows what they do. Salesforce, Palantir, Oracle, ect.
- websiteapi 10mo agoweird - 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.
- w4yai 10mo ago> 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
- morkalork 10mo agoYou're being sarcastic but if I "LLM as judge" one more time, I might jump off a bridge. Also, it does appear that there are companies willing to YOLO themselves off a cliff with AI
- gradus_ad 10mo agoIt'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.
- belter 10mo agoExecutive 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?
- yoyohello13 10mo agoWe 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.
- nobodyandproud 10mo agoSome real leadership in contrast: https://www.wsj.com/business/fibrebond-eaton-bonus-walker-30844d62?st=eegPYY&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink https://www.wsj.com/business/fibrebond-eaton-bonus-walker-30...
- sergiotapia 10mo agowhat is the source for this? seems like a random blog?
- KaiserPro 10mo agoYeah 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"
- frm88 10mo agoA couple of other sources: https://m.economictimes.com/news/new-updates/ai-bubble-bursting-salesforce-execs-admit-trust-issues-after-laying-off-4000-techies-now-scaling-back-use-of-ai-models/articleshow/126139465.cms https://m.economictimes.com/news/new-updates/ai-bubble-burst... https://opentools.ai/news/salesforce-steps-back-from-ai-executives-reveal-overconfidence-in-llms-pivot-to-deterministic-automation https://opentools.ai/news/salesforce-steps-back-from-ai-exec...
- saos 10mo agoSalesforce 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.
- throwaway613745 10mo agoCustomer experience is secondary to making the C-suite more money.
- gortok 10mo agoWhat 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.
- nextworddev 10mo agoone shotted vibe coded blog
- narmiouh 10mo agoIs it just me or anyone else see that this article has no real references to its claims and the articles look like AI slop.
- alexanderchr 10mo agoYes 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.
- herodotus 10mo agoIt 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.
- port11 10mo agoSeems based off CNBC's more informative article: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/02/salesforce-ceo-confirms-4000-layoffs-because-i-need-less-heads-with-ai.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/02/salesforce-ceo-confirms-4000... It does seem like Salesforce relies on Agentforce and therefore doesn't need as much support stuff. But the pressure was also to “reduce heads”, which is a bit of a tone-deaf way to describe firing thousands of people.
- nextworddev 10mo agoThis 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
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- softwaredoug 10mo agoFor 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)
- veunes 10mo agoPoint 1 (document everything) is the utopia that killed the project. In any complex system, documentation is a lossy compression of reality. The actual truth about how to fix bugs doesn't live in Confluence; it lives in senior heads, Slack chats, and intuition, and AI has no access to this layer of tribal knowledge
- pjc50 10mo ago> 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.
- ben_w 10mo agoAll true. A counter, and a counter-counter: The counter: the existing system of checks with (presumably) humans was not good enough. For the last 15 months or so, I have been dealing with E.ON claiming one thing and doing another, and had to escalate it to the Ombudsman. I don't think E.ON were using an AI to make these mistakes, I think they just couldn't get customer support people to cope with the idea "the address you have been posting letters to, that address isn't simply wrong, it does not exist". An LLM would have done better, except for what I'm going to say in the counter-counter. The counter-counter, is that LLMs are only an extra layer of Swiss-cheese: the mistakes they make may be different to human mistakes or may overlap, but they're still definitely present. Specifically, I expect that an LLM would have made two mistakes in my case, one of which is the same mistake the actual humans made (saying they'd fixed everything repeatedly when they had not done so, see meme about LLMs playing the role of HAL in 2001 failing to open the pod bay door) and the other would have been a mistake in my favour (the Ombudsman decided less than I asked for, an LLM would likely have agreed with me more than it should have).
- mbfg 10mo agoMaybe where AI needs to take over is at the CEO level.
- binary132 10mo ago[flagged]
- cons0le 10mo agoI wanted to express similar sentiment, but I didn't understand how I would without leaving a rule breaking comment. It's my sincerely held opinion that we're fostering a culture here that ignores the "human impact" of the technology that we're rushing to adopt. I'm well aware that many members of this community have achieved "success" through software. This includes the rapid adoption of new computing paradigms, new technology stacks, new frameworks, etc. I am fortunate to be employed. But around me, when I step out of my house, it's painful. People are hurting. They're unemployed. They're depressed. And the younger generation is even worse. They can't even afford to dream. I live in a corporate world of forced smiles and fake enthusiasm. I would hate for that same culture to take root here. We need to be able to express significant doubt, or even cynicism against AI, without fear of backlash.
- tomhow 10mo agoHacker News can only be good if enough people make the effort to make it good. There is always going to be a mix of things that push the standard up and things that drag the standard down. That's how averages and distributions work. Unfortunately what we see from you is a pattern of low-effort comments, some of which don't even bother with basic sentence formation features like capitalization at the start and a period at the end. That's a high-signal hallmark of low-effort comments. Looking down your comment feed we see many single-line comments that are low on substance and high in snark. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. They ask us to be kind, and to avoid snark and swipes. They ask us to converse curiously. They ask us not to fulminate, and not to sneer, including at the rest of the community. It's fine to want HN to be better. As moderators we certainly do; that's why we do this job. But it requires us all to actually make the effort to be better in our own conduct. When you see comments from other users that aren't up to standard, we need you to use the tools that have always been here, like downvoting, flagging and emailing us (hn@ycombinator.com) so we can take action. It isn't other people's job to make good enough for you whilst you conduct yourself in this way. If you really want HN to be better, please do your part to raise the standards rather than dragging them down further.
- kevin_thibedeau 10mo agoCompetent 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.
- dangoodmanUT 10mo ago> “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.
- Mountain_Skies 10mo agoAnd 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.
- TheGRS 10mo agoI bounced out of this article pretty quick after seeing it was generated by AI.
- karolzlot 10mo agoIf anyone has doubts about this, check out this map in another article on this site, it's second map in this article and it has this title under it: "Potential Side Effects of a 100% Tariff" https://maarthandam.com/2024/12/01/trumps-brics-tariff-history-shows-retaliation-risks/ https://maarthandam.com/2024/12/01/trumps-brics-tariff-histo... I think it's easier to confirm usage of LLMs by images than by text.
- xnx 10mo agoPublic company logic: Firing people = smart cost cutting Hiring people = strong vote of confidence in continued growth
- anshumankmr 10mo agoAhem did you mean "rightsizing" and "rapid growth"?
- matrix12 10mo agoSauce https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/after-laying-off-4000-employees-and-automating-with-ai-agents-salesforce-executives-admit-we-were-more-confident-about-/articleshow/126121875.cms https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/aft...
- mococa 10mo agoThis site have zero reputation.
- kevinwang 10mo agoThanks. Link should be changed to this. Edit: oh wait, this article isn't the source either. It references an article by "The Information", which I assume is https://www.theinformation.com/articles/salesforce-executives-say-trust-generative-ai-declined https://www.theinformation.com/articles/salesforce-executive... There's also this follow-up: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/story-salesforces-declining-trust-llms-hit-nerve https://www.theinformation.com/articles/story-salesforces-de... It's paywalled, so I can't verify.
- smartbit 10mo agoDec 21 article https://archive.is/oi302 https://archive.is/oi302 and the Dec 23 follow-up https://archive.is/7RXKb https://archive.is/7RXKb
- talos 10mo agoThe Information article can be found on archive.is. Both the OP article and this Times of India article appear to be AI-generated summaries of the original article. Craziness!
- Robdel12 10mo agoI’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.
- davidgerard 10mo agoThe article also reads like it was written with a chatbot.
- computerdork 10mo agoHmm, actually lines up for me at least. It was a pretty big news item a few months ago when Salesforce did this drastic reduction in their Customer Service department, and Marc Benioff raved about how great AI was (you might have just missed it): https://www.ktvu.com/news/salesforce-ai-layoffs-marc-benioff At the time, it was such a big deal to a lot of us because it was a signal what could eventually happen to the rest of us white collar workers. Of course, it could still happen, as maybe AI systems just need another few years to mature before trying to fully replace jobs like this... ... although, one thing I agree with you is that there isn't much info online on these quotes from Salesforce executives, so could be made up.
- DougN7 10mo agoI’m beginning to doubt very much that will happen. AI/LLMs are already based on 99% of all accessible text in the world (I made that stat up, but I think I’m not far off). Where will the additional intelligence come from that SalesForce needs for the long tail, the nuance, and the tough cases? AI is good at what it’s already good at - I predict we won’t see another order of magnitude improvement with all the current approaches.
- computerdork 10mo agoHmm, am no LLM expert, but agree with you that the models themselves for the individual subject domains seem like they're starting to reach their peaks (Writing, solving math, coding, music gen...) and the improvements are becoming a lot less dramatic than couple of years ago. But, feel like combining LLM's with other AI techniques seems like it could do so much more... ... As mentioned, am no expert, but seems like one of the next major focuses on LLM's is on verification of its answers, and adding to this, giving LLM's a sense for when its result are right or wrong. Yeah, feel like the ability for an LLM to introspect itself so it can gain an understanding of how it got its answer might be of help if knowing if its answer is right (think Anthropic has been working on this for awhile now), as well as scoring the reliability of the information sources. And, they could also mix in a formal verification step, using some form of proof to prove that its results are right (for those answers that lend themselves to formal verification). Am sure all this is all currently being tried. So any AI experts out there, feel free to correct me. Thanks!
- arnonejoe 10mo agoWhat swe would want to work there after reading this.
- simonw 10mo agomaarthandam.com is a weird website. Recent posts: Salesforce regrets firing 4000 experienced staff and replacing them with AI December 25, 2025 New Chennai Café Showcases Professional Excellence of Visually Impaired Chefs December 22, 2025 Employee Who Worked 80 Hour Weeks Files Lawsuit Alleging Termination After Approved Medical Leave December 21, 2025 UPS Sued for Running Holiday Business By Robbing Workers of Wages December 18, 2025 This Poor Man’s Food is A Nutritional Powerhouse that is Often Ignored in Tamil Nadu October 5, 2025 Netizens Mourn as Trump Was Found Alive, Promising Tariffs Instead August 31, 2025 Looks like a clickbait farm of some sort?
- coliveira 10mo agoThe most stupid narrative ever. If AI is so good for productivity, why don't you use it to make your 4000 workers produce even more than other companies? Why you need to fire them, so now you have hands tied to your back, and go back to produce the same amount of software? It is completely obvious that the goal is to fire workers, not to get AI stuff done.
- thunky 10mo ago> If AI is so good for productivity, why don't you use it to make your 4000 workers produce even more than other companies? Because they don't have 4000+ workers worth of work to do?
- coliveira 10mo agoIf they cannot think of new features to improve the software, I'm pretty sure their competition can.
- thunky 10mo agoThere isn't an endless supply of features waiting to be built and money waiting at the door to pay for them. Do we really think that the only thing keeping them from being the biggest company on earth is their shortage of developer talent?
- coliveira 10mo agoSo you really believe that we arrived to the end of software? It's obvious that a competitor could create a better software (if that was possible with AI).
- thunky 10mo ago> So you really believe that we arrived to the end of software? No that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that demand (for a product or service) is what drives the amount of labor that is performed, not the other way around. If a company has maxed out the amount of widgets the can sell in their market and adding new features will not change that, then adding more labor makes no sense. It follows that making their existing labor more productive leads to layoffs.
- throw123ha71 10mo agoSo Salesforce is ahead of Microsoft in wisdom. Nadella is focusing on his grand visions again and is telling dissenters to leave: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/microsoft-ceo-satya-nadella-has-started-a-weekly-meeting-which-he-does-not-want-senior-managers-to-attend-instead/articleshow/126114614.cms https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/mic... He also uses cultural revolution tactics and uses the young ones against the old. I imagine AI house of cards will collapse soon and he'll be remembered as the person who enshittified Windows after the board fires him.
- stego-tech 10mo agoI’d love my old job back at this point. I genuinely miss working with such talented colleagues.
- skybrian 10mo agoThis reads like a polished newspaper article, but I've never heard of this website before and there are no links. A search found an similar article from Times of India which credits The Information, there's no good way for non-subscribers to search it.
- veunes 10mo agoThey shouldn't have tried to force LLMs into doing something current models aren't designed for: semantic understanding of "unknown unknowns". Tier-2/3 support isn't just about picking an answer from a knowledge base; it requires deduction, empathy, and finding solutions that don't exist yet. Models excel at generating relevant text for FAQs, but the moment a task requires understanding novel context, correlating non-obvious facts, or recognizing subtle emotional cues from a customer, current LLM architectures fail ruthlessly