Forward Deployed Engineer

Salesforce is eliminating 74 positions at its San Francisco headquarters on 5 October, marking the company's fourth round of layoffs in less than a year. The cuts affect 37 technology and product roles, 34 administrative positions and three sales jobs at the 415 Mission Street office. The redundancies follow previous rounds that eliminated 262 jobs in September 2025, hundreds in February and 86 in June. The company has been implementing AI throughout its operations whilst promoting artificial intelligence as its primary growth strategy. For the quarter ending 30 April, Salesforce reported $11.1 billion in revenue alongside $80 million in restructuring expenses. The company has not disclosed whether additional layoffs will occur at other locations or specified which teams are affected by the latest cuts.

Rippling launches AI Spend Console to track AI usage and ROI across the business. Connects AI spend with workforce data, and closes the loop with AI model controls and routing. Rippling announced AI Spend Console, a new capability that helps companies understand and control AI spend. Unlike other systems that passively report on token consumption, Rippling's AI Spend Console includes advanced employee usage insights and a gateway that actively controls and shapes AI usage in your company. Customers are invited to join the waitlist starting today. The question isn't how much you are spending on AI. It's what your AI spend is producing. Until you can answer that, you're just managing costs - not outcomes. As AI adoption charges forward across every business, leaders urgently need visibility into AI spend: how much, by whom, and whether it's paying off. But there's no way to track these expenses or link them to productivity improvements. Rippling's AI Spend Console provides leaders a clear view of AI spend, showing exactly which models are being used by which departments and teams. Administrators can enforce policies on token spend and AI model access, and route every AI request to the most cost effective models. It's the control layer companies have been missing as AI moves from experiment to infrastructure. Rippling AI brings an entirely new level of insight to the problem. Using the power of Rippling Data Cloud, Rippling AI can answer sophisticated questions about the nature of AI spend in your company. It's far more powerful than the static dashboards of existing solutions. Rippling's superpower of employee identity further amplifies the value of AI Spend Console. It connects AI usage data with employee identity and business data from across your company's systems. It gives leaders a continuous view of spend across tools like Claude, Cursor and Codex, and then measures that spend against signals from systems like GitHub or Salesforce. Rippling identifies not just who is consuming tokens, but what that spend is producing: pull requests, code velocity, and even revenue contributed. "Looking at a dashboard of AI spend shows you a problem, but doesn't offer you a solution. That's a recipe for anxiety," said Matt MacInnis, Chief Product Officer at Rippling. "Our AI Spend Console goes two steps beyond that. First, we give you a way to govern expenses with our AI gateway, so you can keep people from editing slide decks with Fable. And second, we give you a way to map it back to business outcomes, so you know what usage is generating real ROI." AI Spend Console builds on the recently released Rippling Data Cloud, which connects third-party business data to Rippling's Employee Graph, a record of employees, departments, roles and reporting lines. By integrating data from sources such as Salesforce and GitHub with employee information, Rippling AI gains a fuller understanding of the organization and can act on unified data, the foundation for visibility into AI spending. That same foundation generates permissioned dashboards across a company's connected data, so leaders can move beyond a static report: drilling into spend and usage patterns, asking follow-up questions in natural language and customizing charts, all without writing SQL or waiting on a data team. "The question isn't how much you are spending on AI. It's what your AI spend is producing. Until you can answer that, you're just managing costs - not outcomes," said Adam Swiecicki, Chief Financial Officer of Rippling. AI Spend Console is the latest in a series of Rippling product launches over the past four months. The company launched Procurement earlier this week, added Automated Compliance and Business Banking earlier this year, as well as AI-powered Benefits Administration. Rippling introduced Data Cloud in June to connect third-party business data to employee records, and has continued to expand Rippling AI's capabilities across HR, IT, finance, and now AI spending. [To share your insights with us, please write to [email protected]]

Voksha data: 7 in 10 small business calls are repetitive and automatable. August 06, 2026, 22:37 GMT Voksha analysis of 1M+ calls shows routine inquiries like hours, pricing and booking cost small business owners 15+ hours per week. When 7 out of 10 calls are someone asking what time you close or how much a service costs, that's 15 hours a week you could spend on the work that actually grows your business." - Avi Nash, VP of Growth at Voksha LOS ANGELES, CA, UNITED STATES, August 6, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ - Voksha (voksha.com), the AI receptionist platform for small businesses and SaaS companies, today published findings from its analysis of more than 1 million inbound business calls handled since December 2025. The data shows that roughly 7 in 10 calls to small businesses are repetitive inquiries that an AI receptionist can resolve without human involvement. These include questions about business hours, pricing, available services and appointment booking. The finding points to a growing productivity gap for small business owners who still answer their own phones or rely on voicemail. Industry data shows that 80 percent of callers will not leave a voicemail and 85 percent of those callers never call back, meaning each missed or mishandled call carries real revenue risk. "Small business owners don't have a phone problem. They have a time problem," said Avi Nash, VP of Growth at Voksha. "When 7 out of 10 calls are someone asking what time you close or how much a service costs, that's 15 hours a week you could spend on the work that actually grows your business. An AI receptionist handles those calls instantly, in a natural human voice, 24 hours a day." Key findings from Voksha's call data: - 70 percent of inbound calls to small businesses on the platform are repetitive, automatable inquiries. - The four most common call types are business hours (22%), pricing and quotes (19%), service availability (17%) and appointment booking (12%). - Average call resolution time for AI-handled repetitive calls is under 90 seconds, compared to 4 to 6 minutes when handled by a human receptionist. - After-hours calls account for 34 percent of total volume. These are calls that go entirely unanswered without an AI receptionist. - 1 in 3 calls are not in English, consistent with Voksha's previously published multilingual research. How Voksha works: Voksha is an AI-powered phone receptionist that answers business calls in a natural human voice, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. The platform handles appointment booking with real-time calendar integration (Google Calendar, Outlook, Apple Calendar), lead capture and qualification, call routing, and answers to frequently asked questions. No technical setup is required. Business owners forward their existing phone number to Voksha and are operational within minutes. Voksha integrates with the tools businesses already use, including Salesforce, HubSpot, Slack and more than 78 other platforms. The system supports over 200 languages and includes built-in social engineering protection and HIPAA-compliant call handling for healthcare practices. Plans start at $14 per month, with a Premium plan at $99 per month and custom Enterprise pricing for multi-location organizations. All plans include 24/7 call answering, appointment booking, lead capture, call summaries and security protection. Voksha currently serves businesses across 27+ industries including healthcare, legal, SaaS, restaurants, salons, home services and real estate. The platform has handled more than 1 million calls since its launch in December 2025. About Voksha Founded in 2025 and headquartered in Los Angeles, California, Voksha is an AI receptionist platform that helps small businesses and SaaS companies answer every call, book appointments, capture leads and eliminate repetitive phone inquiries. Plans start at $14 per month. The platform combines natural-voice AI with real-time integrations, call intelligence and security-first design. Voksha serves businesses across the United States and Canada. How to setup AI Receptionist in 5 mins Legal Disclaimer: EIN Presswire provides this news content "as is" without warranty of any kind. We do not accept any responsibility or liability for the accuracy, content, images, videos, licenses, completeness, legality, or reliability of the information contained in this article. If you have any complaints or copyright issues related to this article, kindly contact the author above. You just read: August 06, 2026, 22:37 GMT EIN Presswire's priority is author transparency. We do our best to weed out false and misleading content. The content above is the sole responsibility of the author who makes it available. If you have any complaints, kindly contact the author above. Voksha Media Team