Salesforce Chief Predicts Today's CEOs Will Be the Last With All-Human Workforces (axios.com) 63
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said Wednesday that current business leaders may be the last generation to manage an exclusively human workforce, as AI transforms the workplace. "We are really moving into a world now of managing humans and agents together," he told Axios.
His company's Agentforce platform, launched in September, has taken over many customer support tasks, prompting plans to move support staff into sales roles. Speaking to Axios at the World Economic Forum, Benioff dismissed Microsoft's AI CoPilot as disappointing and promised to defend his employees against discrimination amid political debates over corporate diversity programs.
His company's Agentforce platform, launched in September, has taken over many customer support tasks, prompting plans to move support staff into sales roles. Speaking to Axios at the World Economic Forum, Benioff dismissed Microsoft's AI CoPilot as disappointing and promised to defend his employees against discrimination amid political debates over corporate diversity programs.
AI CEO (Score:4, Funny)
They might also be the last human CEOs, but I'm not so sure they were ever human to start with.
Re: (Score:3)
I would suggest that the real work of any company is done by the employees, the people at the very bottom. The higher you climb the food chain (management), the less value you provide... so... yep, CEO's are actually very likely to be replaced, while Joe at the bottom, doing actual work... not as easy to replace.
Re:AI CEO (Score:5, Insightful)
I would suggest that the real work of any company is done by the employees, the people at the very bottom. The higher you climb the food chain (management), the less value you provide...
Unfortunately it's not like that. Management, when done right, is there to solve the problems that get in the way of people doing the real work. This means identifying, or better foreseeing, issues and then coming up with creative ways to solve them. This is something AI is still an incredibly long way from achieving, However, often the real work more repetitive and predictable and AI can cope with that far more easily and so is more at risk of being replaced.
Indeed, I suspect that if AI really does take off then most of us will be moving into management positions with those of us on the lower rungs becoming managers of AIs.
Re:AI CEO (Score:5, Interesting)
You are right that is what management is meant to do, however from my experience its not what it generally does. It usually puts in useless bureaucracy that can turn a 5 minute job into a month project. Makes dumb decisions which the workers have to deal with.
AI is quite capable of doing that, it may also do a better job than most managers. I don't think managers will be the first be replaced by AI, not because they are less suited to being replaced, they don't produce physical output, but because management are the people who make the decisions and they are not going to make a decision to remove themselves. This will progress up the ranks
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You are right that is what management is meant to do, however from my experience its not what it generally does.
I'd not disagree with your assessment but my point was that AI is not capable of doing management well while humans can even if they don't always. You may be right that AI can find even worse ways to do management but that's not an improvement and, if it is that bad, it will be easy for existing management to shoot down any switch to it so I don't see it happening.
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I've run across lots of situations where the bottom line employee is just doing what they want to do, even if it is of no benefit to the company, or if no one has assigned that task, or if it's even not useful. I never understood this, but I keep seeing stuff like that. You don't need management to micromanage that person, but you need management to say "we need to work on X, please stop working on Y". I've even seen entire teams doing their own thing in the lack of management!
So, management is important
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You don't replace CEOs with AI (Score:1)
Re: You don't replace CEOs with AI (Score:2)
Think of the money the board will save
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Why is a CEO the easily replaceable role in a company? I'd say AI is suited to easily replace jobs like data entry. Maybe AI will change technical writing. How does AI do a corporate acquisition with negotiations and all the trimmings?
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Why not? I already have an AI assistant that gives advice on what stocks to buy, and some studies say the are better at picking stocks, https://www.komando.com/tips/m... [komando.com], so corporate acquisitions done really people are not that good at it even experts. The article points out AI can get things 100% wrong but so can people. AI can talk to people so it can negotiate https://www.forbes.com/sites/r... [forbes.com], sure it can't go out and spend lots of money on entertainment.
Re: (Score:2)
So...what's your experience been?
Has your AI assistant been picking winners for you?
Has it found anything that you might not have picked or even known about that was a winner?
Which one do you use?
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Most CEOs don't do acquisitions and such. Even with companies that do this, they often have a VP in charge of the acquisitions and mergers.
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CEO still reports to the board of directors.. yeah, CEO is replaceable. Also, just get him to use the AI to assist him, annnnnd presto! You've trained your replacement. Think of the money the board will save :-)
Speaking of replaceable: The board of directors in most companies could be replaced by AI agents. Hell, they don't even have to be AI.
if($profit > $profit_last_quarter){ $pat_on_head = true; } else { $threats_increase = true; }
Add in a percentage of loss where firing of CEO occurs and you're done.
Not AI, private equity (Score:2)
Speculation:
The CEOs of today's publicly traded companies will be last generation where publicly traded companies market capitalization far exceeds the value of companies owned by private equity funds.
Private equity will grow at its 20% yearly rate, compared to the 7% of stock market cap growth, so that fewer and fewer companies will list on the stock market as they go private.
Once the trip measure trips, Private equity funds will start taking in regular investor's retirement accounts and accelerate the pr
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This is Salesforce. They've already extracted all the humanity they could from their employees.
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Being a CEO isn't even that hard. How many companies can a CEO be a CEO of at once? I can't handle more than 2 jobs at once in infosec, and yet some of these CEOs are in charge of 4-5 companies!
hate to break it to you (Score:5, Insightful)
hate to break it to you, Mark, but our workforce isnâ(TM)t all human right now. do you have people to empty out the chamber pots? Do you have people who count all the accounting on their fingers? and how about that administrative assistant you replaced the other day. You couldâ(TM)ve had sex with her but instead now you have that mobile device in your pocket... the workforce is just changing and salesforce is doing what it always tries to do which is sell a bunch of stuff that is of dubious use too many people
Re:hate to break it to you (Score:5, Funny)
Wait you have chamber pots?
I'm starting to see why these return to office mandates are so unpopular.
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The chamber pots aren't so bad. The drawback is that I'm the one who has to empty them on Thursdays.
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And it's not just computers and robots, those in leadership roles often qualify as inhuman.
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This
TFA is an example of people writing about shit they don't understand the first thing about. It's not just accounting. Anyone in manufacturing already has a large robot workforce in addition to humans. Anything online is largely done by computers and the human workforce is mostly babysitting them.
Just because it doesn't have a colorful sticker with the "AI" buzzword on it doesn't mean it doesn't count.
How convenient (Score:1)
I think he's also forgotten that companies haven't been all-human for a really long time. Since when is a computer not an agent?
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A computer is a tool for work. It's generally a multipurpose tool, but still a tool. His prediction is that decision-making will be removed from humans and set on the "AI Agents."
Secondarily, he's looking for ways to keep his human workers employed, and have the AI systems be a productivity enhancer instead of a job-killer.
Thirdly, he's concerned about how Orange Shitler's policies will result in harm to his employees, which is a sensible concern given the level of rank-ass crossburning Naziism the Repu
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What? Making hiring/firing decisions NOT based on ones race or sexual preference of friction (or self identity) rather than actual qualifications and work output is a "bad" thing??
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Removng DEI also removes checks to ensure you're not inadvertently favoring white males. Not that this happens, corporations have always been honest, upright, and fair.
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In a truly random system....hiring on merit, in the US, you'd have something like 60% whites...18% black, etc....because that's representative of the population distribution in the US.
Now, there ARE chances....that ratios could skew for a number of reasons, some of which are mathematical....
Those are outliers....and I don't really care abo
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We don't know, because merit based hiring is mostly a myth. It hasn't been tried very often. The old boy network was in place for ages and it was most definitely not merit based. Yet the old boy network is what people are trying to go back to. There are idiots being hired in every company, they just don't acknowledge it. When complaining that there are very few minorities or women behind hired, the same idiots that got in because they knew someone will say "we only hire on merit!"
But if you have a dist
The Clone Problem (Score:2)
People tend to hire social-economic clones of themselves for comfort, not necessarily direct racism. Thus, a white-leaning shop would tilt white out of the clone tendency.
Maybe YOU are somehow special and don't have that bias, but you shouldn't assume others are like that. I've been on hiring committees; I've seen the clone tendency play out. No pundit had to tell me it exists, I saw it with my beady little eyes.
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if "somebody's going to come after our employees or discriminate against them in any way, we'll do everything we can to help them, support them."
Amazing how you Inbred Crossburning Fuckwit Nazi Republicans find fault with this. Oh right, you're all Nazi Shitheads who ought to get a Nuremberg trial and then a firing squad.
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I think he knows all that. He is just a crappy individual that likes to lie to generate business. There are a lot of _those_ around.
in the future (Score:3)
In the future, everyone will be a CEO and nobody will give a wet fart what they say. I say current business leaders may be the last generation.. period. Salesforce is a communicable disease. If your company gets acquired by another company that's infected with Salesforce, guess what, you now have Salesforce and there's no cure for it.
âoeAnd that is the power of technologyâ (Score:1)
âoeAnd that is the power of technologyâ
Industrial revolution (Score:2)
Did this guy miss the industrial revolution?
Anyway, if this guy is right, salesforce is soon worth nothing. The problem with salesforce in terms of AI is that it's like a collection of trivial mini apps, almost like excel sheets and a couple forms. Klarna managed to use generative AI and a couple of devs to make a salesforce replacement for themselves in a couple of months. As the value of simple app development goes to zero, salesforce is an easy target as nobody likes it in the first place and it's a huge
Re: Industrial revolution (Score:2)
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Am I the only who first thinks it means Erotic Role Play before realizing it's a different corporate activity that often gets into a hot mess?
Re: Industrial revolution (Score:2)
Peter Principle at work here (Score:1)
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Where do you wire those AI employees' salaries? Same place as the computers' salaries I guess
Oh no. They will work hard to make sure its a subscription model. They AI will cost just slightly less than a real employee. Just enough cheaper to keep you from hiring the real thing.
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Sure... It's just a little at the moment. How often have we seen subscription models start of with a bit of saving, then a little while later they're marginally less expensive, then they'll be after roughly the same as the employee was.
Something about eating a piece of string and then someone pulls both ends of it.
The golden age of grifters (Score:2)
Many workers and managers are actually just copy-pasting their way to the top. We all gotta work BS jobs to pay the bills. It's not like a society where absolutely everybody needs to work is build to be efficient in any way.
AI will empower the con artists among them, and put the people who earn a living by actually mastering their trade and working for real out of a job.
It might free up a lot of people who can show how the king has no clothes. But who cares if the king has clothes nowadays ? They say he ha
"Chief Predicts Today's CEOs will be the Last" (Score:2)
AI Prediction Trash Bin (Score:5, Interesting)
“...machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do.” - Herbert Simon, 1965
“In from three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being.” - Marvin Minsky, 1970 LIFE magazine
“Two years from now, spam will be solved.” - Bill Gates, 2004
"...within a decade my research group would reverse-engineer the human brain by using a supercomputer to simulate the brain’s 86 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses." - Henry Markram, Israeli neuroscientist, 2009 TED Talk
"...computers will have human-level intelligence and will have all of the intellectual and emotional capabilities of humans, including “the ability to tell a joke, to be funny, to be romantic, to be loving, to be sexy." - Ray Kurzweil, 2014
"In ~2 years, summon should work anywhere connected by land & not blocked by borders, eg you're in LA and the car is in NY."" - Elon Musk, 2016
"From our standpoint, if you fast forward a year, maybe a year and three months, but next year for sure, we'll have over a million robotaxis on the road." - Elon Musk, 2019
McKinsey predicted a 30–50 percent productivity improvement for nurses, a 5–9 percent reduction in health care costs, and health care savings in developed countries equal to up to 2 percent of GDP using IBM Watson - 2017 WSJ
“If you define AGI as smarter than the smartest human, I think it’s probably in the next year. Like within two years,” - Elon Musk, 2024
Re: (Score:2)
And what do we learn from that? Right.
Grand promises are made by people that want to sell you something, not people that actually have anything grand or will get it. Oldest trick in the book. Most people are too disconnected to remember how they were lied to even only a year later and hence this continues to work.
As to Musk: This guy is either a fascist (and thereby among the worst human beings possible) or more likely he just crapped on a few million people the fascists killed (and thereby really not much
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Not long ago... (Score:2)
There were CEOs who didn't have staff with spell checkers. Now we have spell checkers all the problems are fixed.
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"There were CEOs who didn't have staff with spell checkers. Now we have spell checkers all the problems are fixed."
You mean spelling checkers.
Spell checkers are for Hogwarts.
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Mod parent funny. That was a good one.
just more AI gaslighting for profit (Score:3)
AI is just computer software. Computer software never redefined the meaning of "workforce" before, it only does not because it serves a narrative.
Workforces are entirely human, by definition. You don't "employ" a machine.
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Indeed. But as the attempts to keep the current AI hype going get more desperate and hysteric, animism and claims to human-like intelligence become more commonplace. Stupid, yes, but the investors funding all this have already demonstrated themselves to be stupid.
So this approach may just work to keep the funding flowing for a few more months before it all comes crashing down. As it must. While LLMs are not completely useless, they are nowhere near as useful as they would need to be to justify the effort ne
I can see AI replacing the CEO (Score:2)
Taken over support (Score:1)
ChatGPT keeps asking for status (Score:2)
Says the guy who just hired 2,000 humans (Score:3)
to sell his AI product.
Nonsense - what does "all-human" even mean? (Score:2)
What does Benioff mean by "all-human"? Is he talking about paying "AI agents" or maybe giving them legal rights? We've had non-human tools for a very long time already. Horses, tractors, robots. Some of these are even largely automated. But we don't talk about these in terms of having an integrated or non-totally human workforce.
How are "AI agents" different from embedded robots on assembly lines? There's a box that controls the machine. That box could be an expert system, an AI model, or some other
CEOs can be replaced easier (Score:2)
Mark views himself leading people and AI's as he replaces Salesforce's engineers and other technical employees. But everything above those workers is just "I'm a people leader" type of employees. Those are far easier to replace with an AI versus an engineer and they really hold no value after the humans are no longer there. And when you replace them, who is really left?
Mark's vision is the end of white collar workers everywhere.
CEO tries to push AI products (Score:2)
more news at 9
experience (Score:2)
Experience indicates that AI hype is followed by AI winter.
what about accountability? (Score:2)
when a worker is replaced with an AI, or as many here are proposing- the CEO... how does that work?
The CEO, and the people at an org also play an element of accountability for the actions a company and it's employees take.
If they are replaced with AI... who is held accountable?
*and yes, i know currently - it's already nearly impossible to hold anyone accountable at a corporation for their illegal/unethical/reckless actions/decisions.