There’s one more thing.

Customers on the receiving end of vapid robot support rapidly lose all confidence in you.

They start describing your company as “falling apart” “useless” “a sinking ship.”

Their ability to ignore this is very impressive.

> those fully-paid-up members of the "AI revolution" cult

Ah ok, so an overly simplistic tribal take by someone with a clear axe to grind and no desire to consider any nuance. Anyone who disagrees with his take -- regardless of their actual positions on various AI-related topics -- is "fully-paid-up" and in a "cult". Is it so hard to consider the _possibility_ that Salesforce making a bad AI rollout doesn't imply the whole industry is doing the same thing? This doesn't completely ignore how varied real deployments are and how messy the reporting around them tends to be?

Overhyped claims abound -- Cursor, Google tweets about math problems being solved, agents cheating in SWEBench because they didn't sanitize git logs, etc. Some of it is careless, some probably dishonest, but the incentives cut both ways. When claims get debunked (e.g., the LMSYS/LMArena confusion around Llama 4 results), the reputational damage is immediate and brutal. No one benefits from making these bad claims that are easy to fact check, no one ever wants to do this. Lots of different stances and claims about how _close we are_ to various capabilities can easily be considered misleading -- fine! But you're going to completely ignore actual measured progress? The accomplishments that are defensible? The industry analysis that is careful and well thought out (see e.g. Epoch)?

> this dramatic deployment, followed by a rapid walk back, is happening across the entire economy.

Which companies? What deployments? Zero concrete cases. Firms make bad calls about AI for the same reason they make bad calls about M&A, pricing, org design; leadership everywhere constantly misjudge reality...will be true until the end of time... Pretty big leap to conclude this implies systemic delusion and anyone detracting is in a cult.

Yet another completely ignored core issue is how distorted the coverage of these things are. I read everything about the company I work for, stories routinely flatten nuanced, defensible, even boring decisions into morality plays because that's far more readable and engaging. Benioff could easily be overselling ordinary layoffs as AI transformation, it gives cover while also a great opportunity to make Salesforce look extremely competent (idiotic and has completely backfired). Yet none of that tells us what is actually happening operationally...