Salesforce CEO Says 30% of Internal Work Is Being Handled by AI (yahoo.com) 43
Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff said Thursday his company has automated a significant chunk of work with AI, another example of a firm touting labor-replacing potential of the emerging technology. From a report: "AI is doing 30% to 50% of the work at Salesforce now," Benioff said in an interview, pointing at job functions including software engineering and customer service.
[...] Salesforce has said that use of AI internally has allowed it to hire fewer people. The San Francisco-based software company is focused on selling an AI product that promises to handle tasks such as customer service without human supervision. Benioff said that tool has reached about 93% accuracy, including for large customers such as Walt Disney.
[...] Salesforce has said that use of AI internally has allowed it to hire fewer people. The San Francisco-based software company is focused on selling an AI product that promises to handle tasks such as customer service without human supervision. Benioff said that tool has reached about 93% accuracy, including for large customers such as Walt Disney.
Profits up 30%? Revenue? (Score:5, Insightful)
If not, it's likely baloney.
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Don't forget the other end of the equation: has the time it takes for a customer to get their support issue effectively resolved decreased?
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Don't forget the other end of the equation: has the time it takes for a customer to get their support issue effectively resolved decreased?
In a word? ... 'No'.
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No the other end of the equation is a fork. More time to resolution, or less time to resolution.
Neither is necessary, the first step is migration to new technology. Now Salesforce can focus on improving performance, or possibly reducing costs further. If you're optimizing a programmable, non human process, you're relieved of the costs of employment. Now you manage the costs of processing bits, managing the whole of it, and adapting to changing circumstances. Not necessarily cheaper than having people doing
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Initially people will start just working normal work weeks. Then the layoffs will come and their hours will shoot back up.
I mentioned this before but think of AI as you're incompetent coworker. The AI doesn't directly replace everything you do what it does instead is replace
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Yep. Been hearing "It's a tight market" for as long as I've been in the market.
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Well, that leads into bankruptcy because while the work might formally get done, errors stack on errors and things go to hell.
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Upfront costs of developing these AI processes will not be reflected in this quarter's earnings. Between that and the time lag of reducing now-superfluous staff, you will have to wait for the increased profits to justify your outrage that this business is now more efficient.
Efficiency often results in profits. Sometimes it results in reduced income due to competition, market retractions, and possibly lost sales from customer dissatisfaction. It's not even that simple in reality.
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You're really overthinking this.... I had one job where i used to walk by upper management working in conference rooms agonizing over data that I knew was entirely fabricated by product and project managers who couldn't provide requirements to a degree required to accurately report to management.
That 30% number sounds soooo vague and fake.
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I can already imagine the mandate that %15 of work be offloaded to AI.
Then the follow up management questionnaire "How much of your departmental work is performed by AI?". Oh uhhh 30%! Yeah yeah double the minimum as measured uhhhh qualitatively!"
Then the followed by a mandate to reduce headcount by %15 as that's about half of the supposed productivity gains. That ought to be safe.
No drawbacks (Score:5, Funny)
Salesforce is already shit, so if the AI output is shit, nothing will get worse.
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This is just the thing. When quality does not matter, AI can do it. But you could also just not have done it and that would have been even cheaper.
It could have been... (Score:1)
I mean, it's Salesforce.
AI is really for summarizing meetings, which could have been emails, which really could have been a side message on slack, which could be better served by a ticket addressed sometime in the next month when someone actually had time for it.
Oh look.. (Score:3)
Another company whose business strategy requires customers believe they have a handle on this 'AI thing' claim they have a handle on this 'AI thing'.
Maybe they do, maybe they don't, but it's hardly a trustworthy source of truth rather than just doing their marketing work for them by relaying their marketing effort as 'news'.
"AI is doing 30% to 50% of the work at Salesforce" (Score:5, Insightful)
That right there should tell you how much added value this company provides.
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Some of their products look like and act like AI. If they can successfully use their own products to deliver, I think that's a good measure of the value.
Even if you cut down the wrong tree, if you do so efficiently, you prove the process works. Right thing, wrong way, well, the next tree cutting project will go better. Your saw is not the problem.
Re: "AI is doing 30% to 50% of the work at Salesfo (Score:3)
"Some of their products look like and act like AI."
This is true. For example "Einstein Search" has a catchy and arrogant name and yet delivers shit results even though it's working from your data. It's exactly like AI!
Translation: We're downsizing due to economy (Score:3)
Unless SF has some amazing AI 1000s of times more accurate than anything the world has seen, there's no way the current AI can vibe code enough to fully hand off any task. So either they hired an army of useless people in the past with no real-world function...or they needed to cut headcount + added some AI here and there and are intentionally misleading investors and staff to imply the AI is why they can operate with less employees...so nope...not a layoff...people...please buy our stock!!!....grads...please apply to work here!!!...current useful employees....don't seek work elsewhere, we're not a sinking ship!
Marc Benioff is famous for being a lowlife and Salesforce doesn't have a reputation for being a top shop in the industry. They're known as "cloud IBM"...but IBM today, not in the pre-Internet era...so NOT A COMPLIMENT.
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So either they hired an army of useless people in the past with no real-world function...
It's a marketing company run by marketers and staffed mostly with salespeople. You do the math.
if your stats are 30-50%, then you don't actually (Score:2)
if your stats are 30-50%, then you don't actually know how much. It's meaningless to say 30-50%... you either know or you don't... this is an estimate.. coming from a CEO... not at all biased to pad those numbers...
it doesn't show-
-the true value, does this make the company more productive? or improve output?
-does the internal work now need to be reviewed to ensure the mistakes are taken care of and modeling improved, or are they just accepting errors and good to proceed with them?
- they fired staff, and r
Re: if your stats are 30-50%, then you don't actua (Score:2)
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year over year revenue growth slowing... profits are down... if those are the agents you were speaking of...
my sarcasm-o-meter is provided by salesforce and AI powered... AND hallucinating...
Quality matters (Score:3)
The MBA assholes are not capable to understand that though. They think "work handled" is the same as "work handled" regardless of who or what does it. That is very much not the case.
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More likely, the MBA *&($#)es look at the outcomes, ROI, and impacts, and if the AI bots serve the customer sufficiently, that is how they will proceed. Not many of these MBA whatever's survive if they think their idea results in less success. Are they sometimes wrong? Well, so are you. And me. Mistakes by some of us mean no new cell phone this year. For others, their mistakes mean a great deal more. Still mistakes. I await your infallible process.
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No. They are _systematically_ wrong. And because they are basically all wrong, individual failures do not get called out.
What happens when Marc is replaced by AI? (Score:1)
It's all bloat (Score:2)
These companies are all the same, they hired a ridiculous amount of people that they didn't need and now they're using AI to do the busywork invented to keep these people busy, are reducing the workforce and clapping themselves on the back for how awesome they are. Huzzah!
I'm convinced that most big companies are huge for no good reason, especially in tech. Do you need to have thousands of devs "working" on your products? Did Twitter need 10000 employees to function? Definitely not (firing 90% within a cou
What work? (Score:2)
Why are they never telling us what type of work work these AI are doing?
It's no wonder. (Score:2)
This is just advertizing (Score:2)
Don't trust anything he says. A company that sells an AI product boasts about how much time they're saving by using their own product. Haven't you heard this many times before? He's just promoting their product, nothing more. He's not a reliable source about how useful it really is.
It's surprising (Score:2)
Because a lot of these companies will switch to AI and then have a layoff after a quarter or two.
1) I don't think that's a long enough time to collect metrics ("see look it's working" -CEO)
2) AI still isn't the same as a human. which would you rather talk to, a human or a bot on the phone?
50% to 70% failures (Score:2)
This is marketing speak, reality is that Salesforce AI fails more than it works. Working 30% to 50% of the time means failing 50% to 70% of the time.
https://www.usefini.com/blog/w... [usefini.com]
He's lying (Score:2)
n/t.
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You sound like an insufferable douche... AI can do art ergo artists are not important. In your example the mail girl can't be replaced by AI therefore she must be important; yet you did nothing except define her lack of value...Your invective about your employees says more about you as a leader than them.
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You sound like an insufferable douche...
You must not be new here ;)
30-50% of work that can be counted? (Score:2)
There's a whole lot of work that can't be enumerated or counted. So it's difficult to put a percentage on that.
I call BS.
Is this the same SalesForce company (Score:2)
...that is hiring 2,000 *more* people to sell its AI product? https://www.cnbc.com/2024/12/1... [cnbc.com]
Something doesn't add up.
Some shitty work they must do at Salesforce (Score:2)
Re: Some shitty work they must do at Salesforce (Score:2)