After Cutting 4,000 AI Jobs, Benioff Draws a Line

The 'Soulless' AI That Took 4,000 Jobs

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is presenting a dual narrative on AI's impact on jobs, drawing a clear line between roles he believes AI can replace and those it cannot. While his company has aggressively replaced thousands of customer support agents with AI, he insists that human salespeople remain irreplaceable.

The "Soulless" AI vs. The "Human Touch"

In a recent interview, Benioff argued that AI lacks the essential qualities for sales, stating, "AI doesn't have a soul. It's not that human connectivity." He emphasized that face-to-face communication is vital, using the networking at Salesforce's Dreamforce conference as a prime example of an irreplaceable human activity.

This philosophy is reflected in his hiring strategy. Despite the AI push, Benioff plans to hire 3,000 to 5,000 new salespeople this year, aiming to grow the sales team to 20,000 account executives.

Contradiction in Action: Massive Support Cuts

This hiring spree follows a major reduction in another part of the business. Benioff recently revealed that Salesforce slashed its customer support workforce from 9,000 to approximately 5,000 employees.

These AI agents have already completed over a million customer conversations, proving their effectiveness at automating routine tasks.

A Strategic, Two-Tiered Vision for AI

Benioff's actions reveal a strategic vision for the future of work:

This stance creates a stark contrast within the tech industry, where widespread layoffs, over 64,000 this year, often do not distinguish between support and sales.

Benioff frames this not as a dystopian outcome, but as the new "reality," making Salesforce a prime case study in AI's dual impact: simultaneously eliminating certain jobs while reinforcing the perceived value of human-driven roles.

Oracle Launches New Marketplace for AI Agents

Oracle has launched a new AI Agent Marketplace, allowing businesses using its Fusion Cloud Applications to easily browse, purchase, and deploy specialized AI agents from a vast ecosystem of third-party developers and consultancies.

Announced at the Oracle AI World conference, this move aims to embed AI directly into the workflow of finance, HR, supply chain, and customer management applications.

A Vast Ecosystem of Pre-Built Agents

The marketplace, accessible through Oracle's AI Agent Studio platform, features over 100 agents from more than two dozen major partners, including:

• Consulting Giants: Accenture, Deloitte, IBM, Infosys, KPMG, and PwC.

• Technology Firms: Box and Stripe.

These third-party agents supplement the roughly 400 native AI assistants and agents that Oracle already provides, offering customers a wide array of tools for specific tasks without requiring custom development.

Key Innovations for Interoperability and Cost Control

Oracle also announced critical technical enhancements to make its AI ecosystem more open and manageable:

Designed for Context and Productivity

A key advantage, according to Oracle EVP Steve Miranda, is that these agents are "embedded inside Fusion applications," which means they automatically understand the user's context, such as their role, data permissions, and the task at hand.

This eliminates the need for manual coding to establish context, allowing an accountant, for example, to instantly investigate a financial variance and drill down to the specific invoices causing it without switching screens.

Practical Use Cases for Immediate Value

The agents are designed to deliver tangible, near-term value by automating and streamlining core business processes. Examples include:

• An Infosys HR assistant that updates employee profiles while enforcing data security controls.

• KPMG’s procurement helper that speeds up access to supplier and price data.

• An IBM sales assistant that reduces errors by prompting for missing information during order entry.

• A Stripe and Infosys invoice agent that improves cash flow by offering incentives to clear outstanding payments.

By creating an integrated, open, and context-aware platform, Oracle is positioning itself to help businesses overcome the common hurdle of generating "significant value" from AI, turning strategic priorities into practical, productivity-boosting tools.

General Intuition Raises $134 Million to Advance AI Spatial Intelligence

AI research firm General Intuition has secured a massive $134 million seed round to advance its work on building AI agents that can perceive and understand the physical world. The funding was co-led by Khosla Ventures and General Catalyst, with participation from The Raine Group and others.

The company, founded by former engineers from Medal, is pioneering a unique approach to artificial intelligence.

It trains its machine-learning models on billions of video-game clips annually, using this vast dataset to teach AI how objects interact within a space over time, a capability known as "spatial-temporal reasoning." 

This foundational skill is critical for developing AI that can operate safely and effectively in complex real-world environments, with potential applications in robotics, autonomous drones, and navigation systems.

Headquartered in New York, General Intuition has also established a significant research and engineering presence in Geneva, Switzerland.

This strategic move highlights Geneva's emergence as a major European hub for AI development, ethics, and governance, and helps the company tap into the region's rich talent pool and research ecosystem.

The substantial seed funding will accelerate the company's research in key areas like reinforcement learning and embodied AI, extending the potential of its spatially aware agents beyond gaming into industrial and environmental sectors.

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