From mass layoffs at Oracle to a fresh Microsoft 365 Copilot capability, here are extracts from some of this week’s most popular news stories.
Oracle Cuts 30,000 Jobs to Fund Its AI Gamble
On the morning of March 31, 2026, thousands of Oracle employees around the world opened an email at 6 a.m. to find out they no longer had a job.
According to reports from Bloomberg and Business Insider, and comments made by senior Oracle employees across social media channels, there was no warning from HR, no conversation with a manager – just a message from ‘Oracle Leadership’ confirming their role had been eliminated, effective immediately.
While the exact figure has not yet been confirmed, it has been reported by TD Cowen via TNW that it could affect up to 30,000 people. This would equate to roughly 18.5% of Oracle’s global workforce of approximately 162,000 people.
One of the employees impacted by the job cuts was Venkatraman Raguraman, a Principal Product Manager at the company who took to LinkedIn to share the news:
“Today, I’m sharing something I didn’t expect to say so soon — I’ve been impacted by a layoff at Oracle.
“This was honestly a shock. Like many of us, I put in long hours and late nights, believing deeply in the importance of what we were building and the impact it would have.”
At the time of writing, Oracle has not responded to CX Today’s request for comment (Read more…).
Salesforce Declares Slack the New Home for AI-Powered Customer Service
Salesforce has announced more than 30 new Slackbot capabilities, repositioning Slack as what it calls “the new interface for work,” a single environment where employees, AI agents, data, and enterprise apps operate together.
At the heart of the update is a push to put AI-powered customer service and employee support in the same place where work already happens, eliminating the context-switching that has become one of the biggest drags on contact center productivity.
For customer service operations used to running at scale, the problem Salesforce is attempting to solve is a familiar one.
Companies are now deploying an average of 20 AI agents per year, but agents scattered across disconnected platforms create their own burden. Employees don’t know which agent handles which task, context gets lost between tool switches, and the efficiency gains AI promised quietly evaporate.
Speaking during a pre-briefing ahead of the announcement, Rob Seaman, EVP and GM of Slack, said:
“I shouldn’t have to know which agent’s a specialist in which task. You should be able to turn to almost a concierge personal agent.”
The goal, as he framed it, is “don’t make me think.” (Read more…).
HubSpot Joins the Outcome-Based Pricing Revolution
HubSpot has announced a new pricing structure for two of its flagship AI agents.
Effective April 14, HubSpot is moving its Breeze Customer Agent and Breeze Prospecting Agent to an outcome-based pricing model.
The Customer Agent will be charged at $0.50 per resolved conversation; the Prospecting Agent at $1 per qualified lead.
In layman’s terms, this means no resolution, no charge; no qualified lead, no invoice.
This pricing shift will undoubtedly carry real implications for CX and customer service leaders evaluating where to put their budgets.
In HubSpot’s official blog, the company stated:
“We believe AI should be priced on the value it delivers, not the compute it consumes.”
This framing is designed to position Breeze not as a cost center to manage but as a revenue and efficiency lever to invest in, which may land very differently on a CFO’s desk (Read more…).
Microsoft Copilot Cowork Signals Shift to Multi-Step AI Workflows for Enterprise Users
Microsoft has made its new Copilot Cowork capability available to participants in its Frontier program, extending the role of Microsoft 365 Copilot beyond content generation into task orchestration and execution across enterprise applications.
The update, outlined in a blog post by Jared Spataro, Chief Marketing Officer, AI at Work, Microsoft, forms part of a wider set of Wave 3 enhancements focused on multi-model AI systems and long-running workflows. Microsoft has integrated the technology that powers Anthropic’s Claude Cowork, enabling long-running, multi-step work across enterprise applications.
Copilot Cowork is designed to allow users to specify an outcome, after which the system generates a plan, coordinates tasks across tools and files, and advances work with human oversight. Spataro described this as a move toward AI that can carry out connected sequences of actions rather than respond to individual prompts.
“Describe the outcome you want, and Copilot Cowork creates a plan, reasons across your tools and files, and carries work forward with visible progress and opportunities to steer.”
The capability draws on Microsoft’s broader “multi-model” approach, combining internal AI systems with models from external partners such as OpenAI and Anthropic. This allows different models to contribute to various stages of a workflow, according to Microsoft (Read more…).
