“All of us have to get our head around this idea that AI could do things that we were doing [before], and we can move on to do higher-value work,” he said in an interview with Bloomberg.
Other companies also seem to be going in a similar direction, with Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski saying the company has shrunk its headcount by 40% due in part to AI investment, and Amazon CEO Andy Jassy saying the e-commerce giant will use artificial intelligence to reduce roles.
Benioff called the rise of AI in the workforce a “digital labor revolution,” estimating that the software company has reached about 93% accuracy with the technology. While he says that this is “good,” he also added it isn’t “realistic” to expect that figure to ever reach 100%.
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Describing a recent strategy session, Benioff said “I just finished writing the business plan for this year, and I always do that with someone else. For the last three years, I’ve also found a new partner in AI. So I have an AI partner, I have a human partner, and it’s the three of us who are writing the plan together. It’s a little less lonely at the top.” This plan includes Agent Force, Salesforce’s platform of AI-powered “digital employees.” These agents are already being deployed to handle everything from customer service and marketing to analytics and sales support.
“These agents… are out there doing this work,” he added. “Servicing the customer, selling the customer, marketing to the customer… partnering with me to do the analytics, the marketing, the branding.”
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Of course, the company’s adoption of AI has led to a significant number of job cuts. The company has cut over 1,000 roles in 2024, part of a broader restructuring effort to focus on AI-driven automation. “We’re probably looking at three to twelve trillion dollars of digital labor getting deployed,” Benioff said. “That digital labor’s going to be everything from AI agents to robots.” However, he also maintains that AI isn’t just about doing the same work faster. He argues it’s about freeing humans up for higher-value tasks.
With about 5,000 customers already using Salesforce AI agents, Benioff says the company is on track to reach one billion deployed agents by the end of the year. He calls this the “by far the fastest growing, most exciting thing we’ve ever done.” Nevertheless, concerns remain about the effect of this on the human workforce with the rising number of layoffs in the tech industry.