Salesforce's New AI Strategy Acknowledges That AI Will Take Jobs (yahoo.com)
- Reference: 0175017685
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/24/09/17/198210/salesforces-new-ai-strategy-acknowledges-that-ai-will-take-jobs
- Source link: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/salesforce-ai-strategy-acknowledges-ai-120000175.html
> 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.
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> 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.
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/salesforce-ai-strategy-acknowledges-ai-120000175.html
AI takes jobs like dishwashers gave you free time (Score:2)
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:3, Interesting)
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.
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 cal
Re:You should think about what that means to you (Score:4, 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: (Score:3)
> 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). The
Techno Feudalism (Score:2)
Racial bigotry is fading away, as is LGBTQ+ bigotry. The 1% need a target to point us at, and I think you're on the right track with the homeless. They'll be the next target.
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.
Re: You should think about what that means to you (Score:2)
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
UBI is worse than useless w/o anti-trust (Score:2)
Without anti-trust enforcement any money given out via UBI gets hoovered up by monopolies. You need universal, guaranteed healthcare too or medical bills get what's left.
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
Re: (Score:2)
> [...] 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
Re: (Score:3)
You keep insisting nobody can tell you where the jobs will come from, but you're ignoring anyone who does. Undocumented immigrants are estimated to make up around 4-5% of the U.S. workforce. This translates to about 7-8 million undocumented workers employed in various sectors across the country. The most common sectors are agriculture, construction, hospitality, and certain service industries, where lower-skilled labor is in high demand. That more than covers your taxi drivers and call center workers.
The
You know they're automating farming right? (Score:2)
Like, they've got machines that pick berries and the only reason we're not using them everywhere is that we treat those migrants as slaves. So much so that the South is having trouble getting them and instead is using prison labor, e.g. actual slaves.
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.
Hopefully their's first (Score:2)
Let's see how smug and cheerful they are then.
There's always edge cases (Score:2)
That won't be in the llm/knowledge base it is trained on that requires human disambiguation skills. I've already got the new GPT-o1 to admit it can't deal certain questions.
So you cut your staff by only 90% (Score:2)
That's still 2.7m Americans out of work (the number of call center employees in America). And with no new jobs on the horizon for them.
DDOS? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
> 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:1)
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)
In the seemingly inevitable limit, material goods and food etc can be produced almost entirely through an automated economy requiring very little labor. Even extremely intellectual pursuits like medicine, engineering, scientific research, law etcetera are also partially supplanted and very substantially enhanced by AI agents.
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
Re: (Score:1)
> 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.
Sure, there will be layoffs... (Score:2)
but only after you train your replacement.
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.
What jobs though (Score:2)
Seems like the only thing this is going to replace is the front-line phone answering people in India that can't do anything except what you could automate anyway.
There's around 3m call center jobs in America (Score:1)
those will get replaced first. Along with any in Europe.
Re: (Score:1)
> 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.
Re: (Score:2)
> 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.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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
Re: (Score:2)
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.