At the 2025 AI for Good Global Summit, Salesforce CEO, Marc Benioff shared his thoughts on AI and his belief that the rise of AI isn’t the doomsday event for white-collar workers that some tech prophets claim.
“That isn’t how I see AI,” he told journalist Nicholas Thompson during a live interview. “Maybe they have AI I don’t have. But in the AI I have, it’s not going to be some huge mass layoff of white-collar workers. It is a radical augmentation of the workforce.”
Benioff’s tone struck a stark contrast with that of his peers. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, has warned that within five years, half of all entry-level office jobs could be gone. Even Ford CEO Jim Farley has said AI could replace half of U.S. white-collar jobs.
But Benioff believes this narrative of mass elimination misses the point. Instead, what he sees and what he’s betting on is that AI will become a co-pilot, not a competitor.
AI has reshaped Salesforce’s workforce
Even as he talks down fears of job loss, Benioff has hit pause on new hires for engineers, lawyers, and customer service staff at Salesforce this year. Not because those roles are going away, but because the company wants space to let AI tools stretch its legs.
Salesforce has been quietly moving employees around — a lot of them. More than half of the company’s hires in the last quarter were internal transfers. Thousands of employees have been reskilled and redeployed to new roles in AI operations, product integration, and customer success.
And behind the scenes, Salesforce’s own AI initiative, known as Agentforce, is already automating between 30% and 50% of tasks across engineering, marketing, analytics, and support functions. Digital agents now handle many routine internal queries and client-facing support tasks, freeing up human staff for more complex assignments.
Concerns about giving AI agents employee taglines
While Salesforce is pausing hires in some areas, it’s ramping up in others. In particular, the company is going all in on sales talent, the people who can help clients adopt and deploy AI tools. Because small and mid-sized businesses, Benioff says, are about to have a moment.
“You’re going to see a lot more SMBs and a lot more mid-market companies because their capabilities are radically amplified by the AI,” he said.
Still, not everyone shares Benioff’s confidence. Even Bill Gates, known for his tempered views on technology, recently said AI will replace most tasks humans do today, though he believes coding will remain a “100% human profession” for centuries to come.
Analysts caution that terms like “AI worker” or “digital employee” can be misleading. In an Axios post from January 23, 2025, a case was made for workers and how calling AI agents workers may not be the right approach.
The article stated, “An AI agent is a way to automate white-collar work using digital technology. That doesn’t make one any more of a ‘worker’ than a typewriter or a copy machine,” adding that “AI makers are rushing to refer to their mathematical models as ‘workers’ because it’s convenient right now.”
