No company for coders. Salesforce won't hire engineers, thanks to AI gains
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Benioff told the 20VC with Harry Stebbings podcast that the cloud giant was in the midst of doing its business plan for next year, and Agentforce — the company's flagship artificial intelligence (AI) product — was the «only thing that really matters today».
In a long-ranging conversation with the venture capitalist, Benioff outlined the reasons why his company decided to implement the hiring freeze. When asked if Salesforce would have more or fewer employees in five years, he said he thinks the company will «probably be larger». «We're not adding any more software engineers next year because we have increased the productivity this year with Agentforce and with other AI technology that we're using for engineering teams by more than 30% to the point where our engineering velocity is incredible. I can't believe what we're achieving in engineering,» Benioff said.
«And then, we will have less support engineers next year because we have an agentic layer. We will have more salespeople next year because we really need to explain to people exactly the value that we can achieve with AI. So, we will probably add another 1,000 to 2,000 salespeople in the short term,» he said.
Arundhati Bhattacharya, Chairperson and CEO, Salesforce India, also told ET last month that AI will enable the workforce to expand their capabilities.
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