SAP, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Workday, IBM — all of them have teams running the exact same silent pilot right now.
"Everyone is running the same playbook." Not as a warning. As an observation from someone who already knows how the movie ends.
Numbers. Let's always start with real numbers.
Oracle confirms cuts of 20,000 to 30,000 positions. Internal sources say the real number approaches 45,000. That gap of 15,000 people between what is publicly confirmed and what sources say is itself a story about how corporations manage the narrative of these transitions.
But the number matters less than the pattern. Because the pattern is what's happening everywhere simultaneously.
What Oracle is eliminating are not the 'obvious' roles — the first-level support tech who responds to basic tickets, the systems operator following a runbook. Those were eliminated years ago. What they're eliminating now are the more sophisticated profiles: solution engineering teams. The consultants who for years flew to Fortune 500 client offices with laptops full of architecture diagrams and decades of accumulated context about how that specific client thinks, buys, and operates.
Why? Because the new AI workflow generates customized database schemas and complete migration plans in six hours. Not six weeks. Six hours.
A team of 12 people that handled Oracle's most complex Fortune 500 implementations — the projects where you needed someone who'd known that company's CTO for ten years, who understood the particulars of their industry, who knew which part of the system to touch and which one to definitely not touch — was notified that their roles were redundant effective immediately.
Twelve people. Decades of institutional knowledge. One round of emails.
And here's the part that should most concern anyone working in enterprise software: SAP, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Workday, IBM — all of them have teams running exactly the same type of silent pilot right now. All of them have their own 'operational efficiency' metrics that will justify very similar decisions at some point between today and the next fiscal cycle.
One source said it with the clinical clarity that only someone at the center of the process has: 'Everyone is running the same playbook.'
Not as a warning. As an observation from someone who already knows how the movie ends.
AI workflows generate customized database schemas and complete migration plans in six hours. The specialized expertise that required weeks now takes an afternoon.
The first wave eliminated basic operators. This wave eliminates the sophisticated profiles: solution engineers, consultants, relationship builders — the people with decade-long client relationships.
The gap between publicly confirmed cuts and what internal sources report is its own story about how corporations manage the narrative of these transitions.
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