Salesforce chief Marc Benioff says AI now does up to half of all the work at his company – News

Salesforce Inc. Chief Executive Marc Benioff says his company is doubling down on the use of artificial intelligence, using the technology to automate dozens of workloads that were, until recently, done by humans.

In an interview with Bloomberg, Benioff (pictured) said AI agents are now performing as much as 30% to 50% of all the work at his company.

“All of us have to get our head around this idea that AI could do things that before, we were doing, and we can move on to do higher-value work,” Benioff said.

The problem for some Salesforce employees is that they’ll need to find another employer who’s willing to pay them to perform that higher-value work. Earlier this year, the company announced it’s laying off about 1,000 of its staff. Although it has also announced plans to hire another 1,000, these new employees will be focused on selling its Agentforce technology. What that means is that those new workers will be tasked with urging other companies to adopt AI that can automate work normally done by humans, potentially encouraging them to replace some of their own employees.

It’s a worrying trend that seems to be catching on. Earlier this month, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wrote a letter to employees where he discussed the company’s increased adoption of generative AI tools and admitted that it will likely need “fewer people” in future than it currently employs.

The rise of AI comes at a time when technology companies are looking for new ways to try and cut costs and boost efficiencies, and many have already announced plans to achieve that by sacrificing human workers.

For instance, Microsoft Corp. had already cut more than 6,000 jobs in May and is now reportedly undergoing a second round of layoffs while investing more in AI, according to Fast Company. Google LLC has also reportedly trimmed people from various departments.

The website Layoffs.fyi says more than 63,000 jobs have disappeared in the tech industry so far this year, and there are growing reasons to think AI is at least partly responsible for this trend.

In his latest newsletter, Brian Merchant, author of “Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech,” writes that he has spoken with dozens of tech industry workers who have been affected by the adoption of AI. He claims that the technology is rapidly reshaping Silicon Valley’s workforces.

According to Merchant, an employee at CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. told him that his company’s recent round of layoffs saw many new hires booted out and replaced with AI, despite saying publicly it was about cutting underperforming staff. “AI has literally killed many jobs at CrowdStrike this week,” the employee said.

An employee at Dropbox Inc. made similar claims about his employer, saying that during its recent round of layoffs, the entire team focused on improving the reliability of its products was let go in favor of AI tools that can automate this work.

Benioff told Bloomberg that the workforce is now undergoing a “digital labor revolution” and said his company’s AI agents can perform work with an accuracy of about 93%.

“It’s pretty good, but it’s not realistic to hit 100%,” Benioff said, pointing out that other companies are at “much lower levels because they don’t have as much data and metadata.”

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