Marc Benioff says Salesforce won’t hire engineers or lawyers in 2025 due to AI

To understand how AI transforms a company’s workforce, consider Salesforce. The software giant has embraced the technology internally, allowing it to suspend recruitment of roles such as customer service agents, engineers and even lawyers. “We are able to reshape our company,” Benioff said at a good summit in Geneva, Switzerland today (July 8). “It will look very different from the beginning by the end of this year.”

However, recruitment pauses are not permanent. “What we’re going to say is, wait a moment and let AI productivity really get to the point,” explains Benioff, adding that Salesforce’s hiring trends may change again as technology develops across sectors.

However, while AI is slowing down some hiring aspects, it is accelerating other areas. Salesforce is currently arriving on thousands of new sales employees to drive its growing suite of AI products. The hub began earlier this year when the company laid off 1,000 jobs in February, partly to make room for AI-focused sales staff.

In addition to its 75,000 human workforce, Salesforce now employs about 9,000 AI agents as customer service representatives. Benioff said their status was not exactly the same.

Still, these agents are doing real work. Over the past nine months, they have processed about a million customer conversations (the same volume managed by the human support team) and operated with Salesforce employees in what Benioff described as “a kind of marriage.”

In addition to reshaping Salesforce itself, Benioff believes that AI will thrive in small and medium-sized enterprises. “It’s easier to start a business and it’s easier to grow a business,” he said, adding that by removing traditional barriers, AI will become a “alliance” of entrepreneurs.

By contrast, larger companies are acting more cautiously. Benioff observed that some CEOs expressed concern about the potential of AI to undermine the industry as a whole. Just last month