ZenDev

I am the VP of Workforce Economics at Oracle. We are worth $420 billion. On Tuesday, we sent 30,000 employees a termination email at 6 AM. Not 9. Not business hours. Six in the morning. They woke up to the word "eliminated." The email came from "Oracle Leadership." Not a manager. Not a name. Oracle Leadership. It said: "We are grateful for your dedication, hard work, and the impact you have made." By the time they read the word "grateful," their access to email, files, and Slack had already been revoked. The gratitude was the last Oracle communication they received. We did not eliminate the roles. We eliminated the salaries. In the same fiscal year, we filed 3,126 H-1B petitions to hire foreign workers. 436 this year alone. The roles are identical. The pay is not. An H-1B software engineer earns $87,000. The domestic median for the same work is $106,000. Eighty-three percent of H-1B workers are classified at entry-level wages for senior positions. The industry calls this a skills gap. It is a pay cut that requires a passport. The visa is tied to the employer. If the worker leaves, they lose their legal right to remain in the country. If they negotiate, they risk the same. If they organize, the sponsor declines to renew. That is retention. Our revenue this quarter is $17.2 billion. Up 22%. Net income up 95%. We have $553 billion in committed future contracts. Up 325%. These are not the numbers of a company that needs to lay anyone off. We took a $2.1 billion restructuring charge. That is the cost of the gratitude. It frees up $8 to $10 billion in annual cash flow. That cash services $156 billion in AI data centers we are building. Starting 2028, OpenAI pays us $82 million per day. Larry Ellison is worth $189 billion. He pledged $51 billion in Oracle shares as collateral for the Stargate AI venture. Announced at the White House. The stock rose 4% on Tuesday. The day of the 6 AM emails. Wall Street did not see 30,000 people. They saw the margin. Amazon laid off 30,000 since October. Filed thousands of H-1B petitions in the same window. This is not one company. This is the operating model. Fire the salary. Keep the role. Fill it with someone whose legal right to remain in the country depends on your continued sponsorship. Pay them less. They will not complain. They cannot. One employee's father worked at Oracle for 20 years. No phone call. No meeting. An email at 6 AM and a locked laptop. The role is still open. The people we fired are free. The people we hired are not.

I am the CEO of a $6.7 billion fintech company. Last year I replaced 700 customer service workers with AI. I called it "the future of work." The future arrived. It's worse. In 2023, we stopped hiring entirely. I announced it on stage. People applauded. Applause is how you know you've made a mistake. We partnered with OpenAI. I said "AI can already do all of the jobs that we, as humans, do." I said this publicly. Into a microphone. With my whole chest. We saved $10 million. I put that in the press release. Press releases are how you celebrate before the consequences arrive. Our employee count went from 5,500 to 3,400. I called it "efficiency." Efficiency is when you fire people and the stock goes up. For a while. The AI handled customer complaints. Customers complained about the AI. It couldn't do nuance. It couldn't do empathy. It couldn't do angry customers yelling about missed payments at 2 AM. Turns out those are the only customers who call. I started getting emails. From customers. About the AI. The AI was hallucinating payment plans that don't exist. It told one customer their refund was "processing in the astral realm." I don't know what that means. Neither did the customer. They posted it on Twitter. It went viral. Not the good kind of viral. The kind where Congress starts asking questions. My VP of Customer Experience scheduled a meeting. She asked if we could "reintroduce human elements." Human elements means people. People I fired. I said we'd "explore hybrid solutions." Hybrid solutions means admitting we were wrong. Without using the word "wrong." I did an interview with Bloomberg. I said "there will always be a human if you want." A human if you want. Like it's a topping. Like empathy is extra cheese. I announced a new hiring initiative. We're bringing back customer service workers. But not as employees. As gig workers. From home. No benefits. No stability. Like Uber. But for apologizing. I called it "flexible human infrastructure." That's not a real thing. But it sounds like one. The workers we fired are now contractors. Doing the same job. For less money. With no healthcare. I called it "the evolution of the customer experience." Evolution means we broke something and fixed it worse. But the word sounds forward-thinking. We spent $10 million to save $10 million. And ended up with angry customers, viral tweets, and a gig economy call center. I'm doing a keynote at Davos next month. The topic is "AI Transformation: Lessons in Leadership." I haven't learned any lessons. But I have learned to call them lessons. That's the same thing. In business.