Salesforce's New AI Strategy Acknowledges That AI Will Take Jobs (yahoo.com) 55
Salesforce is unveiling a pivot in its AI strategy this week at its annual Dreamforce conference, now saying that its AI tools can handle tasks without human supervision and changing the way it charges for software. From a report: The company is famous for ushering in the era of software as a service, which involves renting access to computer applications via a subscription. But as generative AI shakes up the industry, Salesforce is rethinking its business model for the emerging technology. The software giant will charge $2 per conversation held by its new "agents" -- generative AI built to handle tasks like customer service or scheduling sales meetings without the need for human supervision.
The new pricing strategy also seeks to protect Salesforce if AI contributes to future job losses and business customers have fewer workers to buy subscriptions to the company's software. Salesforce is even leaning into the employee-replacement potential of the new technology. Its new AI agents will let companies increase their workforce capacity during busy periods without having to hire additional full-time employees or "gig workers," Chief Executive Officer Marc Benioff said Tuesday during a keynote speech at the company's annual Dreamforce conference.
The new pricing strategy also seeks to protect Salesforce if AI contributes to future job losses and business customers have fewer workers to buy subscriptions to the company's software. Salesforce is even leaning into the employee-replacement potential of the new technology. Its new AI agents will let companies increase their workforce capacity during busy periods without having to hire additional full-time employees or "gig workers," Chief Executive Officer Marc Benioff said Tuesday during a keynote speech at the company's annual Dreamforce conference.
What jobs though (Score:2)
There's around 3m call center jobs in America (Score:2)
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those will get replaced first. Along with any in Europe.
Of course the ones in the USA are such geniuses they can't be replaced by AI.
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Of course the ones in the USA are such geniuses they can't be replaced by AI.
If an American answers the phone, it is either a small company or customers normally need unscripted problem resolution.
Big companies have no reason to pay American wages for basic phone workers.
Even those with American accents are often Filipinos. If you listen carefully, they sometimes slip and merge V&B (like in Spanish) or (more weirdly) P&F.
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We need to stop thinking that the continent you reside in dictates mental capabilities. It doesn't work like that. There's skilled people all over the globe but recent years organisations have been hiring low skilled workers at comparatively low prices just to penny pinch.
If you didn't like off-shoring, you probably won't like this either. If you want a good human service, you have to pay the extra.
Legacy software company seeks to invent (Score:3)
Salesforce is struggling with the MVP cost of doing a implementation for a corporate customer.
Now selling the, you don't need employees, as a compelling business case to use Salesforce.
Meanwhile, a competitor could come in with a drastically lower complexity product and supplant expensive Salesforce corporate installations.
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Problem: Salesforce requires complex implementations for big businesses, and lots of ongoing maintenance and development they'd rather not pay for.
Solution: we got the AI yall
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It's just a ticket system.
If your company has built itself around it (ITIL) then probably you're better off writing your own inhouse ticket system, or getting customising one of the *many* ohters out there.
Probably better in the long run anyhow compared to customising the bigger ones that have been written for more edge cases than your organisation has already.
Salesforce makes me think of Oracle (Score:2)
for some long, convoluted and illogical reason....
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Then the next level will be the buzzword generating C-level executives and their lawyers.
And any business that is stupid enough to do that, deserves what they get from their random buzzword generating AI.
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If you have a small team of say 4 sales people in multiple regions, you then need a Salesforce Administrator role, which pays $80k-$150k depending on the region and industry. If your sales team is around 10 or so people and y
AI takes jobs like dishwashers gave you free time (Score:3)
You fill up the time. The bar raises. Productivity increases, but only a fool would squander it by doing less. I don't know why anyone else isn't saying this.
You should think about what that means to you (Score:4, Interesting)
Your boss notices a ton of people he can replace you with that are younger and cheaper. He fires you, hires one of them. Or maybe he just slashes your pay 50%.
Sure, not every dishwasher is gonna do it, but we're not talking about dishwashers, we're talking about call center reps. There's 3m of 'em in America, most won't measure up, but if 1% do you're suddenly competing with another 30,000 guys. Now do the same for the 7m taxi drivers in America and you're up to 100k.
The excuse I keep hearing is they'll be new jobs for these people, but nobody will tell me what those jobs are. If I press them they tell me they'll be so futuristic I can't imagine them, but Waymo is rolling out self driving cars *now*. And everyone else is chomping at the bit to get those call center jobs replaced in 5-10 years.
The future is right now. Honestly it's been going on for ages we're just not allowed to talk about it [businessinsider.com]
Re:You should think about what that means to you (Score:5, Informative)
There will be new jobs. We don't know what they are.
What we can reasonably say is that they'll be created in the edge cases AI can't handle, and since a lot of people will be competing for them, they'll pay less. They'll certainly be for things we don't need very badly, because we're already producing more than we need.
Established players will resist UBI, the wealth gap will widen, the wealthy will hire security, and we're right back to a feudal system in all but name.
Re:You should think about what that means to you (Score:4, Insightful)
There will be new jobs. We don't know what they are.
What we can reasonably say is that they'll be created in the edge cases AI can't handle, and since a lot of people will be competing for them, they'll pay less. They'll certainly be for things we don't need very badly, because we're already producing more than we need.
Established players will resist UBI, the wealth gap will widen, the wealthy will hire security, and we're right back to a feudal system in all but name.
No. We won't be going back to a feudal system. A feudal system implies that the common folks have *some* minimal value to the oligarchs. It's very small, very small, but there's some value. In our new world? There will be no value to those that can't find work. They won't have money since, as you say, UBI will be resisted by those with the power and influence to allow it to happen. So they won't be consumers. They won't have jobs, so they won't be "contributing" (i.e. creating wealth for the oligarchs). They will rarely have housing, and even if they do they won't have funds to pay their taxes, so they'll be in the street eventually. What we're looking forward to is a time when massive piles of people are just discarded as useless. The seeds are being planted for this already with talk of "useless eaters" and such being bandied about. They'll work and developing the mild discomfort most feel about the current homeless issue into a full-fledged hate by the time it starts happening on a large enough scale that even our government can't ignore it. And if they can stoke the hate hard enough?
There will come a point where the rich say the only solution is mass euthanasia. How they accomplish that will likely be through automation, so that they don't have to witness the horror of it. What a bright future we're creating.
Techno Feudalism (Score:1)
I disagree on the "mass euthanasia" thing though, they won't even bother with that. If we let it go that far then so long as we wallow in our squalor they'll ignore us except to occasionally hunt us for sport to take one of us as a sex slave. If we get too uppity then they'll cut us to pieces with drones.
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Mass euthanasia is already happening. They're relying on the families to target people for it, but between abortion and euthanasia in Oregon at least, an unwanted human being no longer needs to be soaking up resources.
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Racial bigotry is fading away
My daughter, who's a Millennial, thinks racial bigotry is like a pendulum and that Gen X was at the bottom of the pendulum. Before Gen X, there was a lot of racial division, at least in the U.S. The pendulum was on one side. Then Gen X came and we grew up with equality in the back of our minds and the concept of race seemed to disappear (not for us all, but for most). The pendulum was at the bottom. Then came the Millennials and Gen Z, who started interjecting race into every conversation again, but th
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Racial bigotry is fading away
My daughter, who's a Millennial, thinks racial bigotry is like a pendulum and that Gen X was at the bottom of the pendulum. Before Gen X, there was a lot of racial division, at least in the U.S. The pendulum was on one side. Then Gen X came and we grew up with equality in the back of our minds and the concept of race seemed to disappear (not for us all, but for most). The pendulum was at the bottom. Then came the Millennials and Gen Z, who started interjecting race into every conversation again, but this time because the pendulum had swung all the way to the other side in a way that they now acknowledge that different races actually exist.
In my opinion she is right. When I encountered a person from another race, I saw the physical differences. It's kind of hard not to. But that didn't matter, because I treated them like who they were - a person. When the pendulum was on the side before Gen X most white people saw just the race and only the race. Now, with the pendulum on the opposite side, Millennials and Gen Z see the race and automatically assume disenfranchised, because that's what they've been told over and over.
Bit what do I know? I'm just a 56 year old old fart.
Thanks for this post. I'd mod up if I had points. It's a view I haven't really seen discussed before, but makes total sense.
Re: You should think about what that means to you (Score:2)
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In a feudal system, there was some recognition that the serfs would have value in fighting wars or skirmishes. Even that is rapidly disappearing. Putin sent all the poor and criminal to fight and die in Ukraine. Perhaps that's what the future is for Western poor, as they become a net drain
I would guess that the poor will make some decent shields for the first round of drones sent out to clean up the cities. At least, those that are capable of being brainwashed into believing they're fighting for the greater good by protecting the oligarchs. And there will be some. There always are.
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I doubt Greed will survive to implement any system of mass fix. If we think a 10% unemployment rate would cause rioting in the streets, imagine the mass violence when unemployment reaches 25%.
There is nothing more dangerous in the world than a man with nothing to lose. If Greed isn’t careful it will become a victim of that by creating a situation not easily dismissed under the guise of “useless eaters”. They’ll be coming to eat alright. Eat the Rich.
One ant, is never viewed as a
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I doubt Greed will survive to implement any system of mass fix. If we think a 10% unemployment rate would cause rioting in the streets, imagine the mass violence when unemployment reaches 25%.
There is nothing more dangerous in the world than a man with nothing to lose. If Greed isn’t careful it will become a victim of that by creating a situation not easily dismissed under the guise of “useless eaters”. They’ll be coming to eat alright. Eat the Rich.
One ant, is never viewed as a threat. 10 million of them, can easily be.
While I see your point, there's a massive difference between the old feudal systems where the monarchs were protected by men with swords and armor and today's oligarchs, protected by massive armies and soon to be protected by drone armies and mostly completely segregated away from the folks that would want to cause them harm. I wish I could believe if it got bad enough there would be hope the common man could topple the oligarchs, but at this point there are too many safeguards in place for me to think it c
UBI is worse than useless w/o anti-trust (Score:2)
Our current system is a funnel pointing up that we've been able to live with because productivity was moving faster than the funnel could be widened, but the last 4 years of price gouging shows the funnel is plenty large enough now.
As it stands UBI is just going to become an excuse to abandon people to the worse forms of what the li
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[...] edge cases AI can't handle [...]
The trouble is that edge cases that can be handled by an average human but not by an advanced AI are becoming scarce. AI is encroaching into more and more areas and humans are left behind. Combining AI with robots will expand the reach of machines to even more domains that currently still need human workers.
Another thing is that machines evolve using a Lamarckian model, where any advantageous changes developed by a machine generation are carried over immediately and fully to the next generation. This proces
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There will be new jobs. We don't know what they are.
Yes we do know. We know there won’t be jobs. Not like we have today.
AI isn’t like any other revolution where the “solution” was to simply learn a new job. AI is targeting the human mind. There won’t be a job to go “learn” that the machine won’t eventually outperform every human. What will be the AI oddity, will become the machine-perfect expectation. Human output will be compared to machine output every quarter, with appropriate layoffs when those whiny
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The
You know they're automating farming right? (Score:2)
So you're saying we'll be fine as long as we're all willing to become slaves.
Weird hill to die on, but at least you're dead.
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Like, they've got machines that pick berries
Well, if they are the capitalist pig overloads you suggest, then why aren't these miracle picking machines already deployed everywhere successfully? According to estimates from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS), 50-70% of agricultural workers in the U.S. are undocumented immigrants. Less than 1% are from prisons.
So you're saying we'll be fine as long as we're all willing to become slaves.
You being a communist moron does not somehow magically allow you to successfully attribute your own weak reasoning to others. Try speaki
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So this was over 20 years ago and maybe things have changed... but a couple summers I worked for a blueberry coop in one of their collection warehouses. We had two grades of product.
"Fresh" was hand picked and was the product sold in stores in the clear plastic cartons.
"Process" was produced by machines that beat the bushes. Not every berry was ripe and it included a bit of detritus such as leaves and pieces of branches. There was also a machine that would use compressed air to expel the green berries and t
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He's a dishwasher so it's tough to compete with you in your white collar work, but he's half your age so he goes back to school, gets a degree, now he can compete.
Someone's privilege is showing. The vast majority of people have one shot at college immediately after high school... and even then, application fees can stop the process in its tracks. There is an almost zero chance someone already working as a dishwasher can afford to 'go back' to school unless their parents are paying. Rent must be paid.
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AI takes a dishwasher's job. That dishwasher is now looking for a new job. He's a dishwasher so it's tough to compete with you in your white collar work, but he's half your age so he goes back to school, gets a degree, now he can compete.
If you're worried about a sea of dishwashers re-skilling and taking your job, you're probably not very good at what you do. I can certainly say I'm not concerned about that scenario in the slightest. People in those positions rarely have the resources to even reskill without significant assistance. If they did, they wouldn't be dishwashers to begin with unless they were already working while going to school. In which case this changed nothing.
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You fill up the time. The bar raises. Productivity increases, but only a fool would squander it by doing less. I don't know why anyone else isn't saying this.
Because comparing someone’s free time provided by a dishwasher, versus the “free” time someone happens to have after an involuntary job layoff taken by AI, are worlds apart.
If you think that’s bad, wait until we start talking about advancements that make people not merely temporarily unemployed, but permanently unemployable.
Yes, but.. (Score:1)
..what will replace Salesforce when there isn’t anyone left to Sell to?
Gotta love their self-awareness. Along with the rest of the ignorant CEOs drunk on AI firing in droves assuming all those unemployed customers will sustain their revenue stream. Fucking morons.
Hopefully their's first (Score:4, Insightful)
There's always edge cases (Score:2)
So you cut your staff by only 90% (Score:2)
DDOS? (Score:4, Interesting)
I assume that Salesforce doesn't mind at all; they'll just be sending out invoices; but that seems way more vulnerable than classic DDOS techniques against web-facing assets; which certainly aren't free for the victim and can sometimes be mounted for fewer resources than they consume with various clever amplification techniques; but usually don't offer quite so start an asymmetry.
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Is anyone else wondering about the potential risk of subscribing to a service that costs you $2 every single time someone throws even a dubiously-lucid-markov-chain level bot and a handful of kilobytes of traffic at it? I assume that Salesforce doesn't mind at all; they'll just be sending out invoices; but that seems way more vulnerable than classic DDOS techniques against web-facing assets; which certainly aren't free for the victim and can sometimes be mounted for fewer resources than they consume with various clever amplification techniques; but usually don't offer quite so start an asymmetry.
Salesforce is probably working on the bot that can interact with the $2 per hit bot so that they can "maximize profits at all costs." It is, after all, the modern corporate mentality du jour.
Funny (Score:2)
AI can take your job but it can't find one for you.
One can only wonder when technology became the enemy. When I started out it was a hopeful thing.
Man turns everything he touches into a weapon. Every good thing is eventually turned to evil.
That's something AI will never fix.
We have some soul searching to do (Score:2)
So then logically, what do most of us spend our time on? How are we valued by others, and how do we value ourselves? Why are we here?
Some might end up in dopamine-loop recreational obli
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material goods and food etc can be produced almost entirely through an automated economy requiring very little labor
If that economy withholds work from people who want to work, it has a value of zero.
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Is life inside a holodeck worth less than one on the outside? If you lived in The Matrix and you had no idea you were in it, would it really matter that machines were harvesting energy from your brain? I think the answer you seek has been the subject of many movies from those with larger imaginations than you and I combined. In the movies, it always comes down to the anarchists, disrupting the utopian life for everyone else because they believe we should be living free and/or as humans. I doubt real lif
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AI can take your job
LOL! No, it can't. Even shitty front-line support jobs. At $2 a hit, it's still cheaper to hire humans -- even Americans -- and you'll get dramatically better results. One human can handle quite a few chats at once, after all, and they don't really need to handle that many to compete on price. Even over the phone, the average support call is 6 minutes. For less than $20/hour you can hire a human that will not only do a better job, the customer won't be annoyed by a talking to a robot.
AI (LLMs) is a s
Errrrm .... No.(?!?) (Score:2)
No, it can't. Even shitty front-line support jobs. At $2 a hit, it's still cheaper to hire humans -- even Americans -- and you'll get dramatically better results. One human can handle quite a few chats at once, after all, and they don't really need to handle that many to compete on price. Even over the phone, the average support call is 6 minutes. For less than $20/hour you can hire a human that will not only do a better job, the customer won't be annoyed by a talking to a robot.
Sorry, but you're being sill
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LOL! No, it can't. Even shitty front-line support jobs. At $2 a hit, it's still cheaper to hire humans -- even Americans -- and you'll get dramatically better results.
And as compute gets faster, uses less power and more specialized, efficient hardware (i.e., accelerators) is created for AI, what do you think will happen to the cost per unit? And at the same time, what will happen to wages, including probably minimum wage?
Sure, there will be layoffs... (Score:3)
Every time you use AI to assist you, you're giving it training data... for your job.
This will end in tears.... blood too, once all the AI's are trained and billions of people are unemployed.
Hey, you'll have a lot of free time on your hands... and you won't be very happy, so.... start shooting.
Will happen, only a matter of time and place.
OH. The place will be "America".. We got a lot of guns.
The exact time is still unknown.
Re: Sure, there will be layoffs... (Score:2)
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Seems to make sense to me.
I can see this much for example: Medical industries take care of themselves. Go to a doctor and they will refer you to another doctor. We made money, it was good for us. What?! Your elb
Re: Sure, there will be layoffs... (Score:2)
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It all seems to grind to a halt eventually. Governments create basic incomes for the "redundant" population, who spend that income on corporate services. Public money goes in to corporate profits, which mostly go into a few private hands. The only thing left to tax is corporate profits, and the only other revenue generator is mineral extraction. Whatever minerals are important for this merry-go-round to continue spinning become pretty desirable, so country A decides its only option is to invade country B an
Well, duh, they're selling a product! (Score:2)
Of course they're going to say that their "AI" is so good that it will mean customers will have to hire fewer people. That's what salespeople do, they make promises that they often can't keep, or at least turn out to be inflated. We shall see ho well this AI actually performs. So far, some have done a whole lot better than others. The ones that perform well (like ChatGPT) are the ones that spent billions developing their AI. The ones that just threw something together (Google, Jira)...it's not worth much. I