‘Catastrophe in the making,’ tech expert warns about AI

SAN FRANCISCO (KRON) — Layoffs, on top of layoffs, have Silicon Valley tech industry experts warning about catastrophic outcomes after human employees are rapidly replaced with artificial intelligence.

Tech giants including Intel, Google, Oracle, and Salesforce all slashed humans from their workforces this September. An estimated 10,000 jobs were lost to AI within the first seven months of 2025.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said the use of AI agents enabled him to cut his customer support division headcount by 4,000 jobs. “I’ve reduced it from 9,000 heads to about 5,000 because I need less heads,” Benioff said.

On Wednesday, Benioff brought a human-sized robot into the office that was designed by Elon Musk’s Tesla Optimus robotics team.

Benioff uploaded a video on X showing the Optimus humanoid robot’s awkward office debut as it struggled to find a Coke soda and keep up with a basic conversation. “Sorry, I don’t have real-time info,” Optimus replied.

“We need to give it a bit more room. Right now it’s kind of paranoid about space,” a person off-camera suggests as the robot walks away.

Nonetheless, Salesforce’s CEO gave the robot a glowing review. “Elon’s Tesla Optimus is here! Dawn of the physical Agentforce revolution, tackling human work for $200K–$500K. Productivity game-changer!” he wrote on X.

Benioff added, “Congrats @elonmusk, and thank you for always being so kind to me!” Salesforce is developing its own AI system, called Agentforce. Musk launched Grok, a generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by xAI.

Musk delivered optimistic and ambitious messages about his robots this week.

“Musk shared Tesla’s so-called Master Plan Part IV, which positions Optimus as central to the company’s future: The CEO claims ‘about 80% of Tesla’s value will eventually come from Optimus,’ a projection that would value the robot program at roughly $20 trillion,” Fortune Magazine wrote.

Across the board, the San Francisco Bay Area’s heavyweight tech companies are diving head-first into the artificial intelligence market.

“They’re looking at people again like they’re a displaceable asset and they’re not. People interrelate, they work with each other, they create culture. You start dropping people like this, you start damaging performance and productivity,” Rob Enderle, a tech analyst with The Enderle Group, told KRON4.

Oracle plans to lay off 254 workers from its offices in Redwood City, Santa Clara, and Pleasanton, according to Employment Development Department records. That’s on top of nearly 300 jobs slashed at Oracle in August. Salesforce is axing 262 workers from its San Francisco headquarters, records show.

Enderle said the shift to AI is happening too rapidly. Changes that usually take decades to effectively execute are being made by companies within mere months.

He warns, “I think it’s going to be far worse than the dot com collapse because we are so far over our skis with this AI. It’s looking like a catastrophe in the making.”

“Without a much tighter focus on quality, all we’re doing is we’re increasing the level of defects at machine speeds and then we’re getting rid of the people that otherwise might fix those defects so these problems are going to grow,” Enderle said.

A Salesforce spokesperson told KRON4 Thursday that the company is focused on fueling growth. “We continuously assess our structure and rebalance as needed to best serve our customers and fuel growth areas,” the spokesperson said.