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OpenAI eats jobs, then offers to help you find a new one at Walmart

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Re: OpenAI eats jobs, then offers to help you find a new one at Walmart

#211

Post by gamblor956 »

adabyron wrote: post #23
dfxm12 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Salesforce CEO confirms 4,000 layoffs ‘because I need less heads’ with AI - https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/02/salesforce-ceo-confirms-4000...

Those 4,000 were "customer support" positions & Salesforce just happens to also sell an AI product for customer support. They also underperformed expectations in their last earnings. Companies like IBM & Klarna have made news for reducing positions like these & then re-hiring them. AI, like most tech, will increase productivity & reduce headcount but it's not there yet. Remember, the days are long & the years are sho…

This.

Customer support is the "big" thing for AI replacement but it's also the worst role to replace with an AI, since customer frustration can (and usually does) lead to spurned customers switching to competitors.

Salesforce fired 4000 humans and replaced them with a dumb chatbot that couldn't answer many questions beyond the very basic. Customers absolutely hated the chatbot and started rethinking their Salesforce spend, resulting in a number of customers reducing their spend or switching to another CRM provider entirely.

Re: OpenAI eats jobs, then offers to help you find a new one at Walmart

#212

Post by gamblor956 »

Spooky23 wrote: post #20
x187463 wrote: post #7

How many jobs have they actually 'eaten'? For now, we mostly have AI labs and those in proximity claiming some number of jobs will be obsolete, but the actual job loss has yet to manifest.

It’s going to ramp. I have a team where 60% of the staff (6/10) is retiring in a year. Their function is around reconciling utilization and bills from multiple related suppliers with different internal stakeholders. They do a bunch of analysis and work with the internal stakeholders to optimize or migrate spend. It is high ROI for us, and the issue is both finding people with the right analytical and presentation ski…

Yeah, I work closely with people in this space (on the in-house side). You're going to find very quickly that the LLM "analysis" isn't worth much more than the paper its printed on. Due to management directives they have been testing AI tools for financial analysis for 2ish years now and the output is still about what you would expect from an intern who just started working in finance a few weeks before.

Gemini "analysis" looks superficially detailed but if you actually do any deep dive (or even a shallow dive) you're going to start finding all the things its wrong about because it's not actually analyzing anything; its just connecting most likely words together. Very crucial, because of the ways LLMs work, they can't generate any conclusion that isn't already in its data set. But it's exactly those sorts of non-obvious conclusions that are the reason you hire people to do Finance.

Will AI eventually take over these kinds of jobs? Sure, in 10 to 20 years when actual AI exists. But LLMs aren't AI. They're just brute-force black box machine learning algorithms.

Re: OpenAI eats jobs, then offers to help you find a new one at Walmart

#213

Post by rkomorn »

gamblor956 wrote: post #211
adabyron wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those 4,000 were "customer support" positions & Salesforce just happens to also sell an AI product for customer support. They also underperformed expectations in their last earnings. Companies like IBM & Klarna have made news for reducing positions like these & then re-hiring them. AI, like most tech, will increase productivity & reduce headcount but it's not there yet. Remember, the days are long & the years are sho…

This. Customer support is the "big" thing for AI replacement but it's also the worst role to replace with an AI, since customer frustration can (and usually does) lead to spurned customers switching to competitors. Salesforce fired 4000 humans and replaced them with a dumb chatbot that couldn't answer many questions beyond the very basic. Customers absolutely hated the chatbot and started rethinking their Salesforce…

> but it's also the worst role to replace with an AI, since customer frustration can (and usually does) lead to spurned customers switching to competitors

Unless all the competitors are also going the AI route for support, because they're all equally greedy.

That's basically what happened with the path from humans answering the phone to "press 1 to..." to "say 1 to...", or website chat support being replaced by non-AI bots.

I really can't see an argument against the notion that customer service has been steadily worsening as a result of companies preferring to invest less on labor.

Re: OpenAI eats jobs, then offers to help you find a new one at Walmart

#214

Post by toss1 »

bombcar wrote: post #192
toss1 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, software was one of the keys to Walmart being able to expand as much as it did in the 1980s-90s. Their advanced (for the time) inventory & sales systems could tell when some products were selling well in one region and not in another (due to stylistic preferences, prevailing weather, etc.), and they could arbitrage that and move inventory to optimize sales for each location. It was a major advantage over any oth…

Their internal software was so good that their website and online store was an absolute embarrassment for so many years. They finally seem to have turned that around, though I heard they did it buy just buying someone.

Yup.

"In the world of the blind, a one-eyed Jack is King."

Their web stuff was indeed terrible (& still isn't great), and I'd bet management had to do a LOT of wrangling to get the reports, but it still gave them an advantage over those who didn't have the (near-)live data.

Re: OpenAI eats jobs, then offers to help you find a new one at Walmart

#215

Post by HaZeust »

7thaccount wrote: post #193
nunez wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Walmart Global Tech (what Labs was called) got gutted in the layoff-palooza last year. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/walmart-tech-layoff-corporate . Heavy outsourcing, too, so I've heard. I also believe that Walmart is trying to consolidate everyone into their Bentonville HQ; gl trying to get engineers in SFBA to move out to Arkansas!

Bentonville Arkansas is basically like a cheaper Denver Colorado. They have one of the best coffee roasters/shops out there, tons of bike and hiking trails, you're in the Ozarks, a major university is next door in Fayetteville. You're not that far away from doing a float trip on the buffalo river either (1.5 hours). They have tons of concerts there too in Walmart's ampitheater. Also, there is some industry for sure a…

Living in Denver and having gone to Bentonville, I definitely see the similarities - but they're very much in 2 different leagues. Coors holds the economy up here a lot though; and everything in the hometown of Coors (Golden) is only owned by like 3 families - Coors, Foss and Rooney.

Re: OpenAI eats jobs, then offers to help you find a new one at Walmart

#216

Post by ang_cire »

tqi wrote: post #164

Which is it, AI projects have delivered no value or AI is eating all jobs??

"Eating jobs" and "zero value" are the same thing.

You're probably thinking 'profit' rather than 'value', but profit and value are different, and M$ is a great illustrator of this; destroying the value of their acquisitions in favor of short-term profit (often by cutting jobs).

Re: OpenAI eats jobs, then offers to help you find a new one at Walmart

#217

Post by johnnyanmac »

johnbellone wrote: post #194
7thaccount wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bentonville Arkansas is basically like a cheaper Denver Colorado. They have one of the best coffee roasters/shops out there, tons of bike and hiking trails, you're in the Ozarks, a major university is next door in Fayetteville. You're not that far away from doing a float trip on the buffalo river either (1.5 hours). They have tons of concerts there too in Walmart's ampitheater. Also, there is some industry for sure a…

For people that care, the state is politically a no go.

Even if it was a liberal bastion, I am absolutely not moving out of state for a tech company in this period of rampant layoffs. I don't want to be out of a job and in a new, unfamiliar city.

Re: OpenAI eats jobs, then offers to help you find a new one at Walmart

#218

Post by johnnyanmac »

torginus wrote: post #62
EthanHeilman wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my personal experience I've seen: - OCR eat a good chunk of data entry jobs, - Automated translation eat a number of translation jobs, - LLM have eaten quite a few tier I support roles. I don't have numbers tho, maybe people are still doing data entry or hiring translators on mechanical turk.

I have a friend who used to do book translations. Due to some craftsman union rules, the minimum rate for translations has been set (and of course that's what everybody pays). Machine translation didn't decrease these rates, but they haven't been increased in 15 years, which made inflation completely eat it up. Initially machine translation was way worse (by professional standards) than people assumed, essentially us…

>Machine translation today is still just 'okay', not professional quality

"okay" is an overstatement. It's "readable" if you put in triple the effort needed to read proper native language. But you're doing a lot of work re-translating machine languae in your head to understand it.

I guess for businesses that's "good enough". Very few products ever truly get lambasted for bad localization.

Re: OpenAI eats jobs, then offers to help you find a new one at Walmart

#219

Post by johnnyanmac »

daedrdev wrote: post #64

Why are people saying its AI and not the current administration running the economy into the ground?

It can be both. It's not even really "AI" if we're being honest here. AI is just the excuse given for what all companies want to do right now.

The government doesn't need AI to do the slashing and burning, though.

Re: OpenAI eats jobs, then offers to help you find a new one at Walmart

#220

Post by johnnyanmac »

muldvarp wrote: post #43
ryanackley wrote: post #38

There is something kafkaesque about these giant tech companies restricting what you can talk to the AI about under the name of ethics while at the same time openly planning to replace you in the workforce.

Is there? I don't see any contradiction there. For me it's funny that the first time most programmers ever think about the ethics of automating away jobs is when they themselves become automated.

>that the first time most programmers ever think about the ethics of automating away jobs is when they themselves become automated.

It's more about a logical outcome. Automating scripts means existing employees can do other or more work.

AI doesn't feel like that at all. it wants to automate labor itself. And no country has the structure ready for that sort of "post work" world.

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