alt Hacker News"We are our own most demanding customer. Cloudflare’s usage of AI has increased by more than 600% in the last three months alone. Employees across the company from engineering to HR to finance to marketing run thousands of AI agent sessions each day to get their work done. That means we have to be intentional in how we architect our company for the agentic AI era in order to supercharge the value we deliver to our customers and to honor our mission to help build a better Internet for everyone, everywhere."
As an English enthusiast, I'm getting very frustrated at how the language is consistently abused in executive communications to write words without saying anything.
The implication that is NOT said is that suddenly 20% of people were sitting around without any work to do because AI was making everyone so efficient and productive. This does not, however, seem to be the reality, based on conversations within the company. It appears we have yet another case of economic downturn disguised as increasing velocity.
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it's all marketing wank, but how can they "supercharge the value delivered to customers" through company restructuring? whether they hire 50k more people or fire everyone, the value delivered to the customer depends on the quality of the product and the price - irrelevant of cloudflare's margins.
> 20% of people were sitting around without any work to do
Obviously not directly, because work stretches itself to the time available.
Here, I translated it for you (https://translate.kagi.com/?from=linkedin&to=en_us)
"We’re basically using our own staff as guinea pigs. Our AI usage has spiked 600% lately, mostly because everyone from HR to marketing is leaning on bots to do their actual jobs. We’re forced to restructure the whole company around these agents just to keep up with the hype, hoping it actually helps us ship something useful and justifies the "better internet" PR we keep pushing."
I will reply here assuming that you posted with good intent. I think that their PR statement is reasonable from an investor perspective. Try to detach yourself from the personal effects of layoffs. In short, they are saying: Thanks to AI, we don't need as many people to run our business. It is pretty clear to me. Sure, you can be angry about the layoffs, but the economics are clear: AI is increasing profitability faster than the business is growing, so they are using layoffs to reduce costs. Imagine that you have an HR team of five people. If AI has dramatically improved worker efficiency, can you have an equally effective HR team with only four people? That is basically what happened here.
You also have to consider nowadays whether a human even wrote most of it, or if is just a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
But yes I agree the trigger for layoffs is never massive productivity, the reasons give here are completely bogus and if management actually believe any of it the company deserves to die.
Of course it's a lie. Cloudflare is saying, essentially: "AI is making us so profitable that we've decided to reduce our profit by 20%, to keep it reasonable."
Aka bullshit
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Which part of that sentence was confusing? I found it perfectly clear. Their internal AI use is exploding, which is a signal that they need to structure for that, and so they’re laying people off as one of the first steps towards actioning that signal.
Nowhere did they indicate there is less work to do, in fact quite the opposite.
I don't read this as employing 20% was twiddling their thumbs and sitting around.
If it means anything beyond economic issues, I read the implication as their LLM expenses have gone threw the roof and with the choice of cutting LLM use or cutting headcount, well we see what mattered more to them.