It’s official: AI is gobbling up engineering jobs on tech’s native turf.
CEO Marc Benioff said Salesforce, San Francisco’s largest private employer, does not plan to hire engineers this year because of the success of AI agents created and used by the company.
“My message to CEOs right now is that we are the last generation to manage only humans,” Benioff said Wednesday on Salesforce’s earnings call, indicating that companies of the future will have hybrid human and digital workforces.
Benioff added that Salesforce’s mission is to become “the No. 1 digital labor provider, period” to other companies.
Digital labor is performed by AI agents, which are software programs that use AI to perform tasks. Unlike chatbots or search engines, AI agents are proactive and don’t need continual human oversight. They can schedule meetings, execute trades, and even write code.
AI agents are one of the hottest technologies in Silicon Valley. Tech’s biggest behemoths and scrappiest startups are racing to build sophisticated virtual employees.
Salesforce, the leading maker of customer management software, launched Agentforce late last year, enabling companies to delegate responsibilities like handling customer cases and marketing campaigns to AI agents. Almost half the Fortune 100 companies use Salesforce’s AI and Data Cloud products, Benioff said in the earnings call.
Benioff is among the biggest evangelists of AI agents in Silicon Valley. He regularly tweets about the “trillion-dollar digital labor revolution.” Since the beginning of the year, Benioff has tweeted and retweeted dozens of times about the company’s agents.
“In the past 90 days on our help service … Agentforce has managed 380,000 conversations with an 84% resolution rate,” Benioff wrote Wednesday on X. “Thousands of Agents collaborate seamlessly with human counterparts, with only 2% of requests requiring human escalation.”
On the earnings call, Benioff said Salesforce has closed 5,000 Agentforce deals since October and has never seen product growth at this level, calling the last three months the “quarter of Agentforce.”
He proudly touted Salesforce’s agents while taking a dig at Microsoft, one of the company’s main competitors and a favorite target. “Where are they delivering agents?” Benioff asked. “Do they have humans and agents working together to create customer success like us?”
Overall, the earnings call provided mixed results for the enterprise software giant, which missed analysts’ expectations for revenues and earnings per share. The stock, which has slid by around 10% since the beginning of the year, dropped sharply in after-hours trading.
Benioff’s announcement about not hiring more engineers comes after Salesforce cut more than 1,000 roles this year while simultaneously embarking on a hiring spree for workers focused on selling Agentforce. Salesforce has more than 72,000 employees worldwide.
The homegrown tech titan last year laid off around 1,000 people and in 2023 eliminated 10% of its positions, about 7,000. The company has been diligently eyeing its profit margins following pressure from activist investors in 2023.
Salesforce employees returned to the San Francisco headquarters in October, just as Agentforce was being rolled out to customers. Employees returned to 45% less office space than before the pandemic, including the loss of a tower known as “Salesforce East.”
Vernon Keenan, a senior industry analyst at Salesforce Devops, said the company’s pause on hiring engineers is evidence of the “quiet erosion of entry-level jobs” that’s a well-established pattern in Big Tech.
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said in October that AI was writing more than 25% of new code at Google. Mark Zuckerberg this year said AI could soon replace the work of midlevel software engineers at Meta who make mid-six-figure salaries.
“We might be entering the white-collar recession of 2025,” Keenan said.