I’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.

weird - 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.

It 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.

What 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.

Regrets that the cost-benefit analysis didn't work out, not that they fired anyone.

For 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)

> 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.

I bounced out of this article pretty quick after seeing it was generated by AI.

The senior leadership are accountable here. I assume none of them held themselves to task.

Public company logic:

Firing people = smart cost cutting

Hiring people = strong vote of confidence in continued growth

This 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.

Probably the first time I'm saying this, but this site appears heavily AI written.

Sauce https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/aft...

I'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?

The 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.

Salesforce 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.

Executive 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?

I’d love my old job back at this point. I genuinely miss working with such talented colleagues.

But have they hired anyone back?

> 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/.

every single HN comment on these articles makes me doubt both the sentience of my fellow nerds and whether there are any actual human users of this website remaining.

Somebody 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.

What swe would want to work there after reading this.

Maybe where AI needs to take over is at the CEO level.

And 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.

maarthandam.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

Is it just me or anyone else see that this article has no real references to its claims and the articles look like AI slop.

So 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/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.

> “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.

what is the source for this? seems like a random blog?

Competent 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.

This 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