(WND)—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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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
