What they really meant by this is: “Competing products
[at peer companies]”.
This is still in effect, however the primary competing products at peer rivals is now “foundational ai”, and they need far less people and mostly people of a very specific skill sets of ML research, Inference Scaling, Hardware R&D, AI prompt engineering research. Also the cost to play is 10 billion minimum.
So Salesforce will perform rent seeking as long as their moat allows rather than gamble on foundational ai.