AI Won't Take Your Job, but You Might Get Fired Anyway.
This week on Funnel Frontier: New trend alert: you won’t be replaced by AI. Just fired for not knowing how to use it.
This week:
- AI won't take your job. But you might get fired anyway.
- Salesforce just replaced search with Agentforce—and users aren’t having it
Stat of the Week
34% of businesses using generative AI report exceptional customer service compared to those that don’t. CRM.org
AI won't take your job. But you might get fired anyway.
Hope you’re enjoying that GenAI upskilling course, because at Accenture, failure means a pink slip.
The $200B consulting giant just laid off 11,000 employees as part of an AI-first restructuring plan and told analysts, “We are investing in upskilling our reinventors, which is our primary strategy. Those we cannot reskill will be exited.”
Accenture’s AI vision has no space for laggards
CEO Julie Sweet didn’t sugarcoat it. “We are exiting on a compressed timeline people where reskilling, based on our experience, is not a viable path for the skills we need.”
Translation: if you can’t become a prompt-whispering reinvention wizard in record time, you're not part of the future.
Meanwhile, the “reinventors” who do make the cut? They're getting full-stack AI training through LearnVantage—soon to be powered by Aidemy Inc., a Japanese upskilling startup Accenture just acquired.
So, if you’re wondering whether this layoff wave is just about cutting costs—nope. It’s about reallocating talent for a company that wants to become the global AI consulting juggernaut.
The cost of reinvention
The layoffs are part of an $865M restructuring blitz. Even with that, Accenture says its headcount will grow again next year—just not in the same departments.
Basically: subtract legacy skills, add AI-native talent.
And while revenue is up 7% YoY, Accenture’s shares still dropped 2.7% post-announcement—the sharpest dip since 2020—as Wall Street balked at the price tag of all this change.
Still, Sweet insists this isn’t panic, it’s strategy. And they’ve already picked up NeuraFlash and other AI-focused firms this year to round out their agentic AI stack.
So what’s the real play?
Accenture seems to be betting the whole firm on AI, from reskilling internal teams to delivering full-cycle GenAI deployments for clients.
11,000 roles cut. Aidemy rolled in. Everyone left is either building AI, selling AI, or getting trained by it.
The goal? Build a GenAI consulting machine that scales like software.
The message is loud and clear: adapt fast or find the exit. Because Accenture’s not carrying dead weight into the next decade, and neither are your clients.
The Week @ CRM.org
Best Insurance Agent CRM. Because flipping files while your client’s on the phone is not kino. Updated for 2025.
Collaborative CRM. Ever wish your team could read each other's minds? Collaborative CRM is the next best thing, minus the awkwardness.
Weekly Bloom
Jobs-to-be-Done Theory. Innovating is like zapping a bullseye in an earthquake. With Jobs-to-Be-Done, you've got a steadier aim.
Salesforce just replaced search with Agentforce—and users aren’t having it
Let’s say you’re a Salesforce user trying to find a support doc. You click into the Help site and reach for the search bar… except, surprise—it’s gone.
Salesforce has quietly axed classic keyword search and replaced it with Agentforce, its brand-wide AI assistant. The only way to navigate support now? Ask the bot. Hope it understands. Hope it answers.
Users are not amused.
“It’s called Agentforce because they force you to use it.”
That’s a real quote from Reddit, where users lit up the change. Their complaints? Agentforce is slower than a regular search, struggles with accuracy, and often takes multiple back-and-forths to surface what a simple search result used to deliver instantly.
Senior Solution Architect Tom Bassett even opened a ticket on IdeaExchange to bring the old search back. His take:
“Agentforce can produce unreliable results and takes longer to find the information you need.”
Another Salesforce architect, Sarah Orens, called the removal “especially frustrating” given Salesforce’s whole CX mantra about letting customers self-serve.
It’s a fair point: Salesforce talks a big game about empowering users. So why kill the most basic self-service tool?
Innovation or AI adoption theater?
Here’s where it gets sticky. The removal of search aligns perfectly with Salesforce’s bigger Agentforce push—the one it’s touting across earnings calls, product launches, and investor decks.
Forcing users to use the AI assistant? That inflates usage metrics. More interactions. More queries. More headline numbers.
Salesforce says Agentforce is the future. But right now, it’s a half-baked replacement for a tool that worked just fine. And the timing is awkward, given all the layoffs and pressure to prove AI ROI.
The rollback: users 1, forced AI 0
After a week of mounting backlash, Salesforce blinked.
SVP of Digital Success, Bernard Slowey, jumped into the IdeaExchange thread to say the company had “heard the message loud and clear.” The classic search bar is coming back.
His justification? Only 1.7% of Help sessions were using search. But as one commenter pointed out: that’s probably because most people start their journey via Google, not the Help homepage.
In any case, the plan now is to bring back traditional search and eventually bake search into Agentforce itself.
So yes, the AI rollout overstepped. But Salesforce listened and course-corrected.
In a world where forced AI rollouts are becoming the norm, this was a rare example of a big tech vendor reversing a decision based on community feedback—not usage stats or investor pressure.
It’s not just about bringing back a search bar. It’s about showing that user trust still matters.
Galactic Gourmet
CRM blips from around the web
Sprinklr Launches Copilot and AI Agents for Smarter CX Ops. Sprinklr unveiled Copilot for real-time AI assistance and new AI Agents that automate tasks and retain context across channels. Aimed at enterprise teams, the updates simplify feedback management and unify CX on one native platform.
ServiceNow Launches AI Experience as New Enterprise UI. AI Experience is ServiceNow’s new multimodal interface for interacting with AI agents, voice bots, and automation across workflows—including CRM. It brings unified access, governance, and task execution into one AI-native front end.
Microsoft Unifies AppSource and Azure Store Into One Marketplace. Microsoft launched a single marketplace combining AppSource and Azure Marketplace, giving customers one destination to discover, try, and buy business apps. It now supports private offers, flexible billing, and more partner tools.
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