Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has stated that, due to the impact of artificial intelligence (AI), the company will not be hiring any more engineers in 2025.
“We’re not going to hire any new engineers this year. We’re seeing a 30% productivity increase in engineering, and we’re going to really continue to ride that up. And we’re going to grow sales pretty dramatically this year,” Marc Benioff said in a recent earnings call.
Salesforce’s agentic AI is now so commonplace that Marc Benioff disputes numerous studies claiming AI won’t replace human labour. Instead, he envisions a future where the two coexist: “We are the last generation of CEOs to manage only humans. I believe that every CEO in the future will manage both humans and agents together.”
This decision is the result of significant investments in AI by the company, aimed at both increasing employee productivity and enhancing customer efficiency through technologies like agentic AI.
“No business is better positioned than Salesforce to guide customers through the digital labour revolution,” said Marc Benioff.
Salesforce aims to lead the “digital labour revolution,” the CEO continued, saying, “Our goal is to be the world’s top supplier of digital labour.”
“I don’t know of any company that doesn’t need automation for its humans… And I don’t know of any company that’s not going to need an agentic layer,” Marc Benioff said when pressed during the analyst call, indicating the widespread use of agentic artificial intelligence.
Salesforce has already announced around 1,000 layoffs for 2025 but has reportedly been concurrently hiring more salespeople.
The company has also reported weaker-than-expected quarterly revenue, as it issued a forecast on February 26 that fell short of analysts’ estimates.
While the venture’s earnings per share stood at USD 2.78 adjusted vs. USD 2.61 expected (according to an LSEG consensus), overall revenue was USD 9.99 billion vs. the analysts’ expectations of USD 10.04 billion. Revenue increased by 7.6% from a year ago in the quarter ending January 31. Net income, on the other hand, rose to USD 1.71 billion, or USD 1.75 per share, from USD 1.45 billion, or USD 1.47 per share, a year earlier.
“The top category of subscription and support revenue was service, at USD 2.33 billion. The figure was up about 8% and below the USD 2.37 billion consensus among analysts surveyed by Visible Alpha. In the sales category, Salesforce generated USD 2.13 billion in revenue, up 8%, also trailing Visible Alpha’s consensus of USD 2.17 billion,” CNBC reported.
During the quarter, the company introduced its second-generation Agentforce artificial intelligence agent technology, which answers employee questions in the Slack team communications app. The company also completed more than 3,000 paid deals involving Agentforce since October 2024.
“Agentforce has been involved in 380,000 conversations through Salesforce’s help website, with humans getting involved in 2% of cases,” according to the company statement.
“Agentforce will make a modest contribution to revenue in fiscal 2026, with a larger effect in the following year,” said Amy Weaver, Salesforce’s outgoing finance chief.