For a glimpse into how A.I. is transforming company workforces, consider Salesforce. The software giant has embraced the technology internally, allowing it to pause hiring for roles like customer service agents, engineers and even lawyers, according to CEO Marc Benioff. “We’re able to reshape our company,” Benioff said today (July 8) at the AI for Good Summit in Geneva, Switzerland. “By the end of the year, it’ll look a lot different than it did at the beginning.”
The hiring pause isn’t permanent, though. “We’re saying, wait a minute and let the A.I. productivity really take hold,” Benioff explained, adding that Salesforce’s hiring trends will likely shift again as the technology rolls out across departments.
Yet while A.I. is slowing some areas of hiring, it’s accelerating others. Salesforce is currently onboarding thousands of new sales employees to push its growing suite of A.I. products. That pivot began earlier this year, when the company cut 1,000 jobs in February, in part to make room for A.I.-focused sales hires.
In addition to its 75,000-person human workforce, Salesforce now employs around 9,000 A.I. agents serving as customer service reps. They’re not exactly given the same status as their human counterparts, said Benioff, who joked that the digital workers haven’t yet earned a spot on Salesforce’s organizational chart.
Still, those agents are doing real work. Over the past nine months, they’ve handled roughly one million customer conversations—the same volume managed by the human support team—and they operate alongside Salesforce employees in what Benioff described as “a kind of marriage.”
Beyond reshaping Salesforce itself, Benioff believes A.I. will fuel a boom in small and medium-sized businesses. “Starting a business is easier, growing a business is easier,” he said, adding that by removing traditional barriers, A.I. will become an unlikely “ally” for would-be entrepreneurs.
Larger companies, by contrast, are moving more cautiously. Benioff observed that some CEOs have voiced concerns about A.I.’s potential to disrupt entire industries. Just last month, Ford CEO Jim Farley warned that the technology “is going to replace literally half of all white-collar workers in the U.S.”
Benioff sees it differently. So far, he said, he hasn’t heard of any clients making sweeping layoffs because of A.I. “It’s not going to be some huge mad layoff of white-collar workers,” he said. “It’s a radical augmentation of the workforce.”
