"Recently, senior executives at Salesforce have admitted, both internally and publicly, that they massively overestimated AI’s capabilities. They have found that AI simply can’t cope with the complex nature of customer service and totally fails at nuanced issues, escalations, and
long-tail customer problems. They even say that it has caused a marked decline in service quality and far more complaints.
But the problems go far deeper than that.
Both employees and executives have said that the company is wasting countless resources on firefighting to
stabilise operations since the mass AI layoff. Employees have to spend so much time stepping in to correct the wildly wrong AI-generated responses that AI is wasting more time than it saves. In other words, this AI reduces productivity, not increases it.
But there is also a huge problem here with expertise and skill debt. On top of the firefighting to correct the AI, executives have also highlighted how they are also having to firefight to stabilise their systems from problems that were previously easily solved by staff who had
the required experience and skill. However, these staff were fired in the AI layoffs."
+7th largest cement company in the US (5% share)
+61% FL by revenue
+31% mkt share in FL, 30% in VA, 30% in NC, 24% NY
+150 mile profitable shipping radius for cement, ~$0.30/ton/mile by truck, ~$0.06/ton/mile by rail
90% is moved by truck in the US
$TTAM owns a vertically integrated logistics network with rail terminals
US consumes ~104M tons/yr of cement, ~25M is imported
Cement volumes have a 75% r^2 with TOTAL construction spending, resi most important, housing starts still well below normal
Infrastructure bids were up 16% on a LTM basis through Q4 2024 (leading indicator for 2025 revenue), a major acceleration from earlier in the year
Source: Goldman Infra tracker checking 32 State DOT awards + Bidx
Manufacturing is the largest end market of non-resi construction.