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Salesforce's Marc Benioff vs. Verizon's Dan Schulman on AI

April 20, 2026

Happy Monday.

We’re live on YouTube and 𝕏.

The current thing in tech and business is reporting that Meta plans to cut 10% of its workforce, or 8,000 employees.

Today’s lineup

𝕏 anon & Skye Founder Signüll at 11:30 AM
TextQL Co-Founder & CEO Ethan Ding at 11:50 AM
Loop Co-Founder & CEO Matt McKinney at 12:00 PM
Alloy Therapeutics Founder & CEO Errik Anderson at 12:10 PM
Sweet Capital Managing Partner Pippa Lamb at 12:20 PM
Balderton Partner James Wise at 12:20 PM

Salesforce’s Marc Benioff vs. Verizon’s Dan Schulman on AIImage: Alamy

Salesforce ($152B) and Verizon ($195B) are taking hilariously different messaging strategies in the WSJ this week. Marc Benioff at Salesforce said that “people think we have our back against the wall when in fact the opportunity has never been greater.” While deep in the middle of the SaaSpocalypse, Benioff is stressing that Salesforce customers aren’t vibe coding their own CRMs. They might be vibe coding products that interact with Salesforce, but there are simply too many other high-value tasks to focus on for most businesses than building a fully custom CRM. Benioff has been on the defensive, since the stock is down 28% year to date, but that’s not nearly as bad as some SaaS companies that are down more than 50%.

On the flip side you have Verizon’s Dan Schulman, who I would have expected to completely sit out the AI discussions, but has jumped in headfirst. Verizon has incredible assets that feel incredibly resilient to AI disruption. You aren’t going to vibe code a cell phone tower or the rights to a portion of the wireless spectrum. There might be other risk factors, but the stock is remarkably stable and is up 15% year to date.

Schulman is still worried about AI though, and just months into the job, he has predicted 20%-30% unemployment within the next two to five years. This is an insanely aggressive prediction. It’s actually more aggressive than previous statements from Dario Amodei. The one that always goes viral is “50% of all entry-level white-collar work,” which sounds really bad, but America only has 5-7 million entry level white collar workers, and the US labor force is 170 million people. If the Dario prediction came true, the overall unemployment rate would sit somewhere between 6%-9%. Certainly not great and deserving of serious intervention, but far from the “20% to 30%” outlined by Dan Schulman. I can’t tell if this is just a case of “saying the biggest number” to grab headlines, or if he really just has very short timelines for AGI and robotics (he did warn that advancements in humanoid robots could upend the manual-labor jobs still seen as safe today).

I tend to lean into the more optimistic side of things here, but clearly there’s a lot more research that needs to be done. If you want to go deeper, I recommend listening to the recent Odd Lots with Alex Imas, who’s a professor at the University of Chicago focusing on economics and applied AI.

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