Marc Benioff says Salesforce cut 4,000 support roles because of AI agents. Maybe the wrong people are being replaced. This fear-mongering reveals something else. Regular people still need AI products and access. Pithy comments like this expose the arrogant cynical disregard for the workers: “Don’t worry. AI won’t take your job. A person using AI will.” And, don’t forget to consult with George Clooney about next steps in the democracy and evolution of technology.
Cutting overhead again? Maybe it is greed, not AI. That has always been the story: great innovations overtaken and destroyed by greed and scams. We lost hope for the internet 15 years ago. Now even basic access feels elitist, and people know AI will be used to stratify and exploit by bad actors. We are tired of being squeezed, exploited and lied to.
Most performance indicators improve only when jobs are cut, the result of weak vision and crippling risk aversion. AI could do that faster. So why the headlines? If AI has the vision and the strategy, then why do we need a CEO?
The people who produce tangible deliverables are not at risk. We just get to work more efficiently, faster, better. Now, the support center people are going to different company, especially trained Salesforce support staff.
I have been around awhile, since the beginning. I have seen this headline over and over again. They have been trying to get rid of support people for decades. In 2011 AT&T rolled out one of the first chatbots. I know because I designed the avatar interface. Management’s directive was clear: make her “race neutral” so she could appeal to everyone, not too Black, not too white, not too Hispanic, not too anything. Even her name had to be engineered to sit somewhere in the middle. It was awkward, it was pandering, and it failed. And, don’t forget to blame the customer for tech adoption failures – so 1999.
Users picked up on it immediately. Instead of trusting the system, they felt patronized and ignored. The project was a disaster. And at the end of the day, it was not about improving support. It was about cutting call center jobs.
Actually, if it were not for real support people, the internet would never have worked. Most businesses with email and phone contact learned this the hard way. It is only these large companies that want to do business without staff that will have to learn the lesson all over again. But when your primary strategy for growth is cutting overhead, the writing is already on the wall, not in the chat window.
