Mar 20, 2025 08:00:00

Salesforce CEO says he won't hire any engineers this year because of successful AI implementation

By

Dan Farber

Mark Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, which sells customer management software, said that the company no longer needs to hire human (software) engineers because of the full-scale implementation of its new AI product ' Agentforce .' The company plans to not hire new engineers in fiscal year 2025.

Marc Benioff says Salesforce will hire no engineers this year
https://sfstandard.com/2025/02/27/salesforce-marcbenioff-layoffs-tech-agents/

Agentforce is an AI tool that can be used on the Salesforce platform, and can execute decisions and actions such as resolving customer interactions, selecting customers who are highly interested in your products, and reviewing marketing. Unlike conventional chatbots, this product allows you to build AI agents that use advanced reasoning capabilities to perform tasks autonomously, and is said to be able to work on behalf of humans.

At a financial results presentation held in February 2025, CEO Benioff announced that 'Agentforce has signed more than 5,000 contracts in almost half a year.' He said that his company also uses Agentforce, highlighting the usefulness of the product, and added that 'Agentforce has been a success, so we have no plans to hire engineers this year.'

According to CEO Benioff, nearly half of the Fortune 100 companies use Salesforce's AI and data cloud products, which have managed a total of 380,000 customer cases with an 84% resolution rate. 'We can call these past three months the Agentforce quarter,' he said.

By Dan Farber

Salesforce has more than 72,000 employees worldwide, but plans to lay off 7,000 employees, or 10% of its total workforce, in 2023 and an additional 1,000 employees in 2025.

Meanwhile, to boost Agentforce's sales, the company is hiring 1,000 sales representatives by 2024.

Tech company Salesforce hires 1,000 salespeople to sell sales AI to replace salespeople - GIGAZINE

'My message to other CEOs right now is we will be the last generation to only manage humans in our companies,' Benioff said, suggesting that companies of the future will have both human and non-human workforces.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, 'Maybe by 2025, we and other companies will have AI that can write code like a mid-level engineer,' and Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that by 2024, '25% of the code written in-house will be AI-made.' Other company executives have also pointed out the possibility that coding engineers will be replaced by AI.

Google reports third-quarter 2024 financial results, with sales up 15% year-on-year to $88.268 billion & Google Cloud up 35% year-on-year to $11.353 billion, revealing that more than a quarter of the code generated in-house at Google was generated by AI - GIGAZINE