The hottest new hires are no longer engineers — at least not at Salesforce.
Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, said during Wednesday’s quarterly earnings call that the company’s number of engineers has “been mostly flat” over the past two years at around 15,000, citing “new coding agents” with “dramatic capabilities.”
But talking about Salesforce’s growing head count, Benioff said, “it’s mostly growing in Miguel’s area, in sales,” referring to Miguel Milano, Salesforce’s president and chief revenue officer.
“Because, I think we all realize the one thing that we are doing here with you, selling and communicating, the agents are not exactly doing that,” he said, adding that sales will be a critical arm of the company’s expansion.
While Salesforce’s sales representatives are safe, others are not. Benioff said in September that Salesforce had cut about 4,000 support roles, which AI agents would handle.
He’s also been big on AI use within the company, saying earlier this month in an interview that Salesforce is projected to spend $300 million on Anthropic tokens on projects this year.
Benioff’s comments come as Silicon Valley companies are slashing headcount because of AI.
Cloudflare cut roughly 20% of its workforce in May, citing “massive productivity gains” from AI usage, CEO Matthew Prince said during the company’s first-quarter earnings call.
The fintech company Block slashed nearly half of its workforce earlier in the year, with CEO Jack Dorsey saying in a shareholders’ letter that “intelligence tools have changed what it means to build and run a company.”
Standard Chartered CEO Bill Winters went viral last week for saying he was replacing “lower-value human capital” — a comment he’s since apologized for.
But executives have said that some jobs are not yet capable of being replaced by AI. Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn said in a podcast interview this month that AI can’t match the work of his artists and designers, and he won’t lower the quality of his app just to use AI.
Benjamin Todd, the president of the career research nonprofit 80,000 Hours, told Business Insider that many key tasks in jobs aren’t automatable, and that workers should focus on “safe skills” rather than “safe jobs.”
