Last Month, Salesforce Announced It Hit $1.2 Billion in AI Revenue—Now It's Laying Off Staff Tied to the Product - inc.com

Salesforce, flush with $1.2 billion in AI revenue, has decided the best way to celebrate is by sacking the very people who built the golden goose. Less than two weeks after CEO Marc Benioff crowed about shipping more code without hiring more engineers — a statement that now reads less like a boast and more like a warning label — the company laid off employees tied to its Agentforce AI product. The announcement of billion-dollar AI revenue was meant to signal strength; instead, it marked the beginning of a purge of the very team that delivered it.

One must admire the ruthless efficiency of Benioff's strategy. His vision of "more code, fewer people" has been accelerated to the point where even the human architects of that productivity miracle are now surplus to requirements. It's a masterclass in vertical integration: use AI to replace engineers, then use AI to replace the engineers building the AI. The logical endpoint is a single server humming in a basement, managing itself, while Benioff counts his billions from a yacht named *Agentforce*. The laid-off employees might take grim comfort in knowing they've been automated out of existence by their own creation — a poetic end, if a poorly compensated one, and a fitting tribute to the company's commitment to "innovation."

This is hardly an isolated incident. One wonders if the remaining staff are updating their resumes or, more sensibly, training their replacements to be as efficient as possible. The answer, knowing Silicon Valley, is probably both, with a side of frantic side-hustle planning.