A sales team is even more important! Actual humans to talk to you—this is the future! The demand for non-automated, human tasks will skyrocket. Our society will shift back to being human-centric, just like before any automation.

I think they presented it wrong for impact. If instead of "killed" and "eliminated" they were saying that the internet made it possible to proceed without a sales team and that cloud computing made it possible to not need a bare metal IT team, it makes a little more sense. That is to say, it's not going to be the most effective way, but it went from impossible to at least viable. Similar to music recording. It used to be you needed competent instrumentalists and access to a commercial recording studio. Now you can do it all at home on a laptop and it is viable, people are successfully doing it. But in large part the most successful music is still done using the same professionals that existed before.

It's like someone took the most extreme hype for a bunch of past shifts, all of which have already played out so we know they definitely did not work out that way, as if all the hype described what had actually happened, then also took the same hype for "AI" and assumed all that's going to be, or is, true, too.

Yeah the premise of the article is totally wrong.