AI means ‘Actually India’: How Salesforce’s AI smokescreen masks a mass labor shift out of America

For the past year, American tech workers have been told a familiar story: Artificial intelligence is replacing jobs. From boardrooms to press briefings, executives have framed workforce reductions as the inevitable result of machine learning and automation. It’s the narrative that’s guided mass layoffs across the industry.

But in the case of Salesforce, one of the most prominent voices in enterprise software, the facts point elsewhere.

Behind the company’s public claims of AI-driven efficiency lies a more traditional and far more controversial strategy: offshoring. Between 2020 and 2024, Salesforce reduced its U.S. workforce by thousands while growing its employee base in India by more than 420%. Offices in San Francisco, Portland and other U.S. hubs were shuttered. Simultaneously, the company signed formal training and hiring agreements with the Indian government and celebrated explosive growth in Hyderabad, Mumbai and beyond.

Salesforce isn’t alone in the illusion of automation. Amazon’s heavily hyped “Just Walk Out” AI-powered checkout was, in truth, driven by over 1,000 workers in India manually reviewing surveillance footage. What was marketed as innovation was really offshore labor behind the scenes. Likewise, Microsoft’s investment in a virtual assistant “Natasha” turned out to be 700 Indian employees posing as chatbots.

These weren’t breakthroughs in AI; they were high-tech facades for cheap labor.

2022–2023: Strategic cuts in the U.S., accelerated hiring abroad

These weren’t isolated missteps. The pattern is clear, with companies using the language of “AI innovation” to mask what amounts to global labor arbitrage. Behind the curtain of automation lies a deliberate strategy to cut costs by cutting Americans out of the workforce – and Salesforce fits the mold.

Salesforce’s labor realignment began in 2022, hitting U.S. recruitment teams following hiring freezes and small cuts to corporate operations. But while American jobs were disappearing, Salesforce was announcing plans to add 2,500 new roles in India, a 33% workforce increase.

In January 2023, Salesforce initiated its most sweeping cost-cutting measure to date, the termination of approximately 7,000 employees, or 10% of its global workforce. CEO Marc Benioff attributed the layoffs to pandemic-era growth that had outpaced demand. Public messaging emphasized a return to operational discipline.

But the company’s own filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission offered a different, more pointed explanation.

According to Salesforce’s 10-K filing for 2024:

“In January 2023, we announced a restructuring plan … intended to reduce operating costs, improve operating margins and continue advancing our ongoing commitment to profitable growth. The Restructuring Plan includes a reduction of our workforce and select real estate exits and office space reductions within certain markets.”

India becomes the growth engine

What emerged next underscored the stark imbalance in Salesforce’s global strategy. While the company was in the process of laying off thousands of U.S. employees and scaling back its real estate footprint to achieve $3-5 billion in cost reductions, it was simultaneously accelerating its investments in India. The contradiction was laid bare in a report from the Times of India, which noted:

“At a time when CRM giant Salesforce has been slashing jobs and cutting down on its real estate footprint globally in a bid to prune costs by $3-5 billion, it is beefing up its India presence with a chunk of it happening in Hyderabad.”

Arundhati Bhattacharya, chairperson and CEO of Salesforce India, publicly confirmed the shift in focus: “When I joined Salesforce in 2020, we had 2,500 employees. Today, we have more than 13,000. This growth reflects the company’s increasing reliance on India for leadership and talent.”

Even amid internal cost-cutting, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, speaking at a Dreamforce 2024 conference, said, “There is no question that we are moving into an exciting era for India. We have invested aggressively in the country.”

Institutionalizing offshoring: a formal pipeline into India

In September 2023, Salesforce formalized its offshore expansion by signing a Memorandum of Understanding with India’s All India Council for Technical Education, or AICTE. The agreement established a nationwide initiative to embed Salesforce’s Trailhead platform into more than 2,500 Indian engineering colleges. The stated goal was to train 1 million Indian students and create 500,000 direct job placements across Salesforce’s ecosystem.

2025: Artificial Intelligence becomes the public rationale

In February 2025, Salesforce conducted yet another wave of layoffs, this time affecting over 1,000 employees and reassigning an additional 500. The company attributed the cuts to “productivity gains” enabled by artificial intelligence, asserting that automation, not offshoring or cost-cutting, had made certain roles obsolete. The layoffs were projected to save the company $50 million.

Public messaging emphasized a forward-looking transition into an AI-driven era. Salesforce claimed it would be hiring fewer software engineers going forward, citing reduced demand due to automation technologies.

“We have reduced some of our hiring needs,” said Chief Financial and Operations Officer Robin Washington during a call with analysts. According to Bloomberg, she credited the adoption of AI tools as the primary reason for slowing down recruitment, especially in engineering and customer service roles.

Once again, while Salesforce is telling the American public that artificial intelligence is eliminating jobs and reducing the need for new hiring, especially among engineers and service roles, in a presentation titled The Salesforce Economy: India Powered by AI Cloud Solutions, Salesforce tells a very different story.

According to Salesforce’s own projections shared with Indian stakeholders, the company expects its AI-powered cloud solutions to create 2.72 million jobs in India by 2028, including 1.17 million direct jobs. That’s a 185% increase from 2023 levels.

Let that sink in:

In the U.S., AI is the reason for layoffs. But in India, AI is the reason for record job creation.

The real transformation was geographic, not technological

While offshoring gets rebranded as “innovation,” and layoffs are justified under the banner of “efficiency,” Salesforce boldly claims that artificial intelligence saved the company $50 million. However, that savings didn’t come from cutting-edge automation, but rather, from eliminating U.S. jobs and shifting the work overseas. Prospective customers, clients, stockholders and investors are being sold a fantasy of automation, when in reality, it’s labor arbitrage dressed up in buzzwords.

Salesforce’s public claims of $50 million in “AI-driven” cost savings isn’t just a bold claim. It conveniently markets its own products while signaling to investors that its software, specifically its “Agentforce” AI platform, is slashing operating expenses. In its white paper, “Maximizing ROI with Agentic AI: Why Agentforce Is the Fast Path to Enterprise Value,” Salesforce projects that agent-based AI will automate $6 trillion worth of global labor tasks, explicitly stating that such tools “free up human agents” and promise faster ROI through “reduced operational costs.”

While Salesforce tells American workers their jobs are being eliminated due to AI, in India it promises massive job creation, projecting over 2.7 million new roles by 2028 tied directly to its AI cloud platform. That’s not automation, it’s offshoring. Like Amazon’s “Just Walk Out” high tech “AI” stores, quietly powered by more than 1,000 workers in India, and like Microsoft’s “AI” investment in chatbot “Natasha,” staffed by 700 Indian workers behind the scenes, Salesforce is following the same script. Their “AI” isn’t automation, but outsourcing for cheaper labor overseas – that’s the real dynamic behind all their cost-cutting headlines.

This kind of illusion may also cross legal lines. Under the rules of the Securities and Exchange Commission, publicly traded companies are required to truthfully disclose material risks, operational changes and forward-looking statements. Attributing layoffs and future hiring slowdowns to AI, while telling a foreign government the same technology will create millions of new jobs, may mislead shareholders about the company’s actual labor strategy.

Innovation or extraction?

So which is it, Salesforce?

Does the company no longer need American workers because of automation? Or is AI simply cheaper because it’s being built in India under government contracts and lower wage structures? Or are those “millions of jobs” promised inside India not actually needed, which would mean the company’s AI hiring pledges are either inflated or unsustainable?

The contradictions raise serious questions. But one fact is undeniable: When Americans invest in Salesforce, they’re investing in a company that itself no longer invests in the country that built it. America still drives more than 67% of Salesforce’s revenue, yet it’s India where the company is concentrating its future workforce.

That’s not innovation, it’s extraction. And it’s something Salesforce should be disclosing.

So while the company may be selling a global narrative of digital transformation, it’s actually selling out American workers.

It appears that, at least for Salesforce, “AI” doesn’t stand for “Artificial Intelligence” as much as it stands for “Actually India.”

Editor’s note: Follow WND’s major investigative series exposing the truth behind ongoing corporate betrayal of American workers. The American people deserve transparency, not propaganda that masks laying off their countrymen and offshoring their jobs as “technological innovation” or “corporate restructuring.”

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