Sandra Sucher, a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School who studies layoffs, said that if companies handle layoffs properly, former employees may consider reemploying. “If you want me back, give me value,” she said. Still, many former employees are concerned about rebuilding their careers at the company beyond their current situation.

At the beginning of this year, many large companies in Silicon Valley said that they had hired too many employees in the previous two years and then began to lay off employees. According to data from Trueup.io, a recruitment platform for the technology industry, various technology companies have laid off about 350,000 employees so far this year, with layoffs peaking in January.

Cloud software company Salesforce plans to hire about 3,000 more employees after cutting 10% of its workforce earlier this year. Salesforce expects to hire employees in areas such as sales, engineering and the data cloud product team, and said the new hires are mainly to grow the company’s artificial intelligence business and attract more investment.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff called on older employees working elsewhere to consider coming back. The company recently held an alumni day event aimed at attracting older employees back to the workforce, handing out stuffed toys wearing “Boomerang” shirts to about 50 former executives.

However, for employees who have been laid off, they may still be dissatisfied with how Salesforce handled their departures. Some employees criticized the way the company communicated the layoffs, saying they were contrary to the culture Salesforce has built. For years, executives like Benioff have encouraged employees to treat their coworkers and the company like family.

Salesforce said earlier this year it would sharpen its focus on profitability and efficiency in response to pressure from activist investors on business growth and margins. This seems to mean that a focus on profitability will trump the company’s “family” philosophy.

Thatcher says that for some older employees, the fact that the company knows you and you know the company may mean it’s worth considering returning.

She said employees considering returning to their old companies might ask themselves some questions: Why was I fired? Why do you need me now? Why should I trust you again?

In many cases, making the decision may not be easy. For some employees, re-establishing trust in the company will be a difficult task.

“I would probably take another look at the company and fundamentally no longer fully trust it,” Thatcher said.

In late July, a user on the social platform Reddit asked whether he should return to his old company. The user was fired from the company, but a few weeks later the company changed its mind and offered him a management position in another department.

The user had started a new, lower-paying job and faced a dilemma. He wrote: “The company fired me not long ago, so I obviously have doubts about it.” Other netizens gave different suggestions, some suggested going back, some suggested continuing to search, and some suggested more demanding positions. Return only after payment.

Another Reddit user wrote that he received a call from a former department head at the company who both hired and fired him. He was asked if he would be interested in returning. “Honestly this is the last thing I expected,” the user wrote.

This precarious employment attitude is familiar to workers in industries such as hotels. For example, many restaurant workers were laid off during the early stages of the pandemic, and when lockdowns were lifted, employers scrambled to recruit to fill vacancies because employees also wanted better working conditions.

Now it’s the tech workers’ turn. Some may demand higher pay, while others may argue that tech companies are unavoidable from making large-scale layoffs. However, job stability remains a major consideration on recruitment platforms like Trueup.io. People consider not only job postings from well-known companies like Amazon or Meta, but also the number of days between a job opening and the company starting layoffs.

Strong market demand may lure some employees back. Overall, major technology companies have strong demand for talent with artificial intelligence skills. A LinkedIn spokesperson said the number of English-language job postings mentioning AI technology has increased 21 times since November 2022, when ChatGPT first went live.

Thatcher said employees who decide to return to their old companies may want to understand the company’s strategy to avoid being laid off again. Even laid-off employees who ultimately choose to return may view the company differently, she said. Thatcher said: “This has a lasting impact on people’s sense of security, shaking their assumptions that even if I do well, I may not be able to keep my job.”

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In March, Salesforce launched a $250 million venture capital fund targeting generative AI startups, which Salesforce says is aimed at startups that are developing ChatGPT-like technologies that can be used with their commercial software applications.

Salesforce invested in four startups at the time: search engine newcomer You.com, AI startup Anthropic, natural language processing (NLP) startup Cohere and relationship management system startup Hearth.

In March, Salesforce also launched its Einstein GPT service and said it was working with ChatGPT developer OpenAI to add its technology to its collaboration software, Slack.

The so-called cloud service will include Einstein, Salesforce’s first all-inclusive AI platform, Slack, an office instant messaging app, and Tableau, a data analytics software that Salesforce says will cost $360,000 a year for an “AI Cloud” starter package.

Salesforce’s move shows the growing number of tech companies that are combining their tools with generative AI.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said of the move: “AI is reshaping the world and changing business models in ways we never imagined. In the future, every company will have to put AI first.”

In addition to its own products, AI Cloud will host big language models from other companies, including Amazon Cloud Services (AWS), Anthropic and Cohere, among others. Big Language models are the core software system for generative AI such as ChatGPT.

Salesforce says the AI cloud service will restrict Big Language Models from retaining sensitive customer information to protect the data privacy of businesses using the service.

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On Tuesday, local time, Salesforce announced that the company will integrate artificial intelligence technology in a new version of its software products to help corporate salespeople, customer service specialists and marketing staff complete their jobs efficiently, including answering customer questions and writing marketing emails. wait.

Salesforce said the new product will be called “Einstein GPT” and will use artificial intelligence technology from OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT.

In November last year, OpenAI, a company backed by Microsoft, launched ChatGPT on the Internet. This artificial intelligence robot can smoothly talk to humans and write articles, and then caused a worldwide sensation.

ChatGPT represents a new kind of “generative artificial intelligence technology”, which can create text and various information after being trained by the massive data of the Internet (right protection). The success of ChatGPT has led many technology companies to join this new wave, ready to seize new business opportunities.

It should be pointed out that these artificial intelligence robots and language models are still immature and will give wrong answers. Therefore, relevant manufacturers adopt a more cautious attitude when providing services to large enterprises or government agencies.

Clara Shih, CEO of Salesforce’s “service cloud” business, said that they are moving quickly on generative artificial intelligence technology, but at the same time cannot sacrifice the moral responsibility of product quality.

Recently, Microsoft’s “Dynamics 365” business software that competes with Salesforce has integrated artificial intelligence technology, but the Microsoft team is also doing everything possible to minimize the negative impact of misinformation.

Last month, Microsoft announced a new artificial intelligence feature in the aforementioned software that could help corporate sales reps compose emails. On Monday, Microsoft announced that it will also launch a similar feature in the customer after-sales service section. Users can apply to join a waiting list to experience Microsoft’s new feature as soon as possible.

After ChatGPT became popular before, Microsoft also integrated OpenAI’s dialogue robot into its own Bing search engine for the first time.

According to reports, in the “service cloud” department, an artificial intelligence function launched by Salesforce includes a chat window, and Salesforce can use its own massive information to compose an answer to a user’s question. Software users only need to modify and improve this answer.

More recently, Salesforce has come under pressure from some activist shareholders to improve operations and boost profitability. For the above-mentioned new artificial intelligence features, the company has not announced the specific pricing and release schedule. The management said that a beta version will be launched first, and we will understand the evaluation of enterprise users for the beta version.

Salesforce takes several steps to avoid misleading users about possible wrong answers. For example, users still need to edit the answers, and Salesforce also limits the scope of inventory information used to generate answers.

Business software rivals Microsoft and Salesforce have both recently introduced features that automate the writing of marketing emails, and Microsoft calls the artificial intelligence capabilities in Dynamics “Copilot.”

Charles Lamanna, a vice president of Microsoft, said that the new feature introduced by Microsoft cannot be called “autopilot”, which provides users with multiple document options, and marketers can modify and edit. , to select the most suitable email manuscript for the company’s marketing plan.

In addition, Shi Zongwei said that Salesforce is also promoting a new software developed by OpenAI for enterprise chat and collaboration software Slack. This software is related to ChatGPT, and Salesforce can use it to display some information from the company in Slack. A Salesforce spokesperson said users can join a waiting list to apply to try the new software.

For this new wave of artificial intelligence, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is very interested. During last week’s earnings call with analysts, Benioff mentioned the word “artificial intelligence” 14 times.

In the introduction about “Einstein GPT”, Benioff said that Einstein GPT will be integrated with the company’s existing “data cloud”, “Customer 360” and other software, which will bring the next stage of artificial intelligence. The new era of artificial intelligence promotes the digital transformation of enterprises.

Shi Zongwei said that Salesforce began to cooperate with OpenAI’s language model team more than a year ago, but the recent enthusiasm for this technology in the industry has prompted the company to advance the timetable to allow customers to enjoy some black technology as soon as possible.

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Salesforce says it’s targeting startups that are developing ChatGPT-like technology that can be used with its business software applications.

In addition, Salesforce announced on the same day that it will integrate artificial intelligence technology in the new version of the software, providing functions such as answering customer questions and writing marketing emails. The new product is called Einstein GPT and uses artificial intelligence technology from OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT.

“We’re still in the very early days, but we’re seeing large language models transforming many disciplines,” Clara Shih, CEO of Salesforce’s “Service Cloud” business, said earlier this week.

The financial report shows that Salesforce’s total revenue in the fourth quarter of the fiscal year 2023 was 8.384 billion US dollars (currently about 58.353 billion CNY), a year-on-year increase of 14%, excluding the impact of exchange rate changes, it was a year-on-year increase of 17%.

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Salesforce’s announcement of massive layoffs on its fourth day into 2023 is a pretty clear sign that the worst is yet to come for tech companies, even if last year was a very unfavorable environment.

To be sure, Salesforce’s situation does not correlate well with the market as a whole. The company’s revenue growth has slowed, it’s lost executives like co-CEO Bret Taylor, and it’s integrating after a major acquisition that saw Salesforce acquire Slack, whose founder recently left Salesforce.

Enterprise customers are cutting IT budgets, which will affect Salesforce, Microsoft and other tech companies that primarily target this market. As revenue slows, these companies are expected to make more cost-cutting, take tougher austerity measures and perhaps even lay off more workers.

But the market also has a different view, and Bernstein’s analysts say that even in the face of such macro trends, “cloud computing should be the most defensive business among large technology companies. Even in the worst economic environment, enterprises are unlikely to completely abandon their reliance on major platform providers.

IT managers at enterprise customers are now re-evaluating their investments in new technologies over the past two years. At the beginning of the outbreak, enterprises were busy shifting to a telecommuting model and purchasing a number of new cloud-based software tools to do so. When they bought tools like Zoom or Notion, they didn’t necessarily take the time to consider what the total cost of ownership would be.

Executives are caught in the fog of war over demand visibility, and they don’t want to be the first to take the conservative route,” wrote Alex Zukin, an analyst at research firm Wolfe Research, in a recent study. Software buyers are scared, not just because their budgets are down, but because they could lose their jobs.”

Analysts also point out that it’s hard to predict how much-related spending will fall, because cloud computing as a whole is a relatively new industry. Looking ahead, basic enterprise spending on cloud infrastructure will likely remain the same because it has become a necessity. However, “non-mission-critical” add-on services and cloud software tools will take a hit.

Not all cloud infrastructure spending is mission-critical,” Bernstein analysts wrote. We are seeing many enterprise customers choose to downgrade, review various software licenses, and ‘right-size’ their cloud infrastructure plans. Amazon is actively working with their customers.”

Analysts at both Bernstein and Royal Bank of Canada noted that this also means that enterprise plans to migrate to cloud computing platforms will slow down in the coming months.

Analysts at Royal Bank of Canada said, “Enterprises are increasingly focused on sorting out cloud computing costs and reducing spending on specific providers.” For large cloud infrastructure providers, this means more customers will reduce costs by adopting cross-cloud strategies. For software providers, any company that offers a single tool rather than a platform is likely to take a hit. However, the Salesforce layoffs are a sign that even platforms are likely not to be seen as mission-critical as they were a year ago.

Analysts note that companies are preparing for a poor start to 2023. Analysts at Royal Bank of Canada expect more layoffs to come. It’s also hard to make a complete forecast at this point, considering that many companies have yet to give earnings guidance for the year ahead. They wrote in a research note: “As the third quarter earnings season approaches, investors are still watching to see what the year ahead will look like. With only a handful of companies currently providing guidance for next year’s results, 2023 remains largely an unknown.”

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Taylor joined Salesforce in 2016 when he sold his productivity software startup, Quip, to Salesforce, and played a key role in Salesforce’s $27.1 billion acquisition of Slack, the largest deal the company has ever made.

Exactly one year ago, Taylor, 42, was promoted from his position as president and chief operating officer at Salesforce. Benioff described Taylor at the time as “an extraordinary industry leader who has created incredible success for our customers and driven innovation across the company.”

Given the speed with which he was promoted and the trust he enjoyed with Benioff and the board, his departure was a surprise. Two months ago, Benioff and Taylor were together at the company’s “Power of Dreams” conference in San Francisco.

The resignation statement also raised doubts about Benioff’s ability to work with people in the same position as him. About three years ago, former Oracle executive Keith Block also resigned as co-CEO of Salesforce, just 18 months after he was promoted from chief operating officer to the position.

Shortly after Block became co-CEO, Benioff told the press that he liked the idea of having someone else share the top job so they could have a “divide and conquer strategy” and so he could spend his time investing, philanthropizing and training other business leaders.

It’s been a busy year for Taylor.

Taylor was chairman of Twitter before Elon Musk completed his acquisition of the company last month. In a September interview, Taylor said the deal “didn’t get talked about a lot” at Salesforce customer meetings. Taylor hasn’t tweeted since Oct. 26.

“I’m grateful for the six wonderful years I spent at Salesforce,” Taylor said in a statement Wednesday, “and Mark has been a mentor to me since before I joined Salesforce. The opportunity to work with him and co-lead the world’s most important software company has been defining for my career. After much deliberation, I decided to return to my entrepreneurial roots. salesforce has never been more relevant to its customers, it has a top-notch management team, the company is working well, and now is the perfect time for me to leave.”

Prior to Quip, Taylor sold FriendFeed to Facebook and helped create Google Maps.

Taylor received $22.8 million in total compensation in fiscal 2022, most of which came from stock awards, according to the company’s most recent proxy filing. That figure is up from $13.9 million last year. Salesforce employees earned a median salary of $181.612 million last year, the filing said.

As of Jan. 31, Taylor held about $80 million in unvested stock, most of which came from restricted stock he received when Salesforce acquired Quip. The restricted stock “is payable in equal quarterly installments through August 2023, subject to Mr. Taylor’s continued employment with the company,” the proxy filing said.

Also on Wednesday, Salesforce reported better-than-expected third-quarter results. But the company’s shares fell 6 percent in after-hours trading.

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