In September 2025, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff went on a podcast and said something that should have sent a chill through every office worker in the world. His company, he explained, had cut its customer support division from 9,000 employees to roughly 5,000 because AI agents were now handling 30 to 50 per cent of the work. “I need less heads,” he told host Logan Bartlett on The Logan Bartlett Show, with the casual confidence of a man who had just discovered a cheat code. Just two months earlier, in a Fortune interview, Benioff had publicly dismissed fears that AI would replace workers, insisting it only augmented them. The pivot was breathtaking in both its speed and its honesty. But here is the thing about cheat codes: they do not always work the way you expect. Across the technology industry and well beyond it, companies are making enormous bets on artificial intelligence's ability to replace human workers.…