AI Has Made Salesforce Engineers More Productive, So the Company Has Stopped Hiring Them, CEO Says (itpro.com) 48
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said this week that his company's software engineering headcount has remained "mostly flat" over the past year as internal AI tools have delivered substantial productivity gains.
Speaking on TBPN, Benioff said he has about 15,000 engineers who are "more productive than ever." The company has redirected its hiring efforts toward sales and customer engagement roles, hiring 20% more account executives this year as it pushes its Agentforce agentic AI service.
Human salespeople remain essential for explaining the "intricacies and nuances" of agentic AI to skeptical enterprise customers, he argued. Other parts of the business have seen deeper cuts. In a separate appearance on The Logan Bartlett Show, Benioff said that Salesforce had reduced its customer support workforce by roughly 50%.
Speaking on TBPN, Benioff said he has about 15,000 engineers who are "more productive than ever." The company has redirected its hiring efforts toward sales and customer engagement roles, hiring 20% more account executives this year as it pushes its Agentforce agentic AI service.
Human salespeople remain essential for explaining the "intricacies and nuances" of agentic AI to skeptical enterprise customers, he argued. Other parts of the business have seen deeper cuts. In a separate appearance on The Logan Bartlett Show, Benioff said that Salesforce had reduced its customer support workforce by roughly 50%.
Re: 15,000 engineers? (Score:3)
I donâ(TM)t think they need any engineers. Each year they use their marketing department and Dreamforce conference to find a new way to rebrand and repackage their existing products as something new, including the use of fabricated demos of features and products that donâ(TM)t exist and likely never will.
Finally, a use for LLMs! (Score:5, Insightful)
"AI made us more productive" has become the perfect excuse for the layoffs and hiring freezes that were going to happen anyway, given the state of the economy. I wonder how long people will believe it?
Re: (Score:2)
I wonder why there is a steady stream of articles about how much more productive AI has made employees coming from companies that sell AI-powered solutions. Why don't we get a similarly steady stream of such articles from companies that don't sell anything AI-related?
(For clarity: these questions are rhetorical).
Late stage capitalism (Score:5, Insightful)
Mass unemployment is celebrated as a success story...
Re: Late stage capitalism (Score:2)
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What's they're saying is that they're generating more and more code with less and less human eyes to look at it... recipe for success!
Late stage baloney (Score:1)
Ho hum. (Score:2)
That translates into job losses (Score:4, Insightful)
We are going to have too many people and too few places in society for them and traditionally when that happens the people who need handouts resent getting handouts and the people who give the handouts resent giving them. So you have a nice big war between those two groups.
Ubi isn't on the table because of that resentment. Never mind all the other social and economic problems like how we don't police monopolies anymore so they can just jack up prices to absorb Ubi money. You can't even implement it in the first place because the billionaires won't let you and the public at large won't get behind it because of the resentment I mentioned above.
When we hit 25% unemployment that's about where we were at when world War II started, only this time we have nukes. We also have idiots in charge threatening to invade Greenland. I don't care what your political party affiliation is or what identity markers are important to you the United States shouldn't be threatening to invade Greenland and you know it.
Best case scenario your kids get drafted to fight. Also if you have medical training they will draft you too and they don't care how old you are.
Worst case scenario the war goes nuclear and that's the end of it for everyone. Doesn't even matter if the nukes work there's enough of them to fuck up the entire environment and end our species. Yeah we've survived a few bottlenecks here and there but nothing like nuclear war.
I legitimately do not know a solution to this. The billionaires aren't going to stop automating all the jobs away because they do not like capitalism they do not like consumers and they do not like employees. It is incredibly frustrating how their wealth and prestige is entirely dependent on us filthy filthy consumers and employees.
But then for everybody else I don't know what you do when you have 25 to 30% permanent unemployment because we just don't need people and everyone involved in that resents everyone else. You can't explain away feelings and resentment is a feeling.
Our species just isn't set up for this. If anyone has any answers I'm open to them but I think we're fucked
Re: (Score:2)
Re: That translates into job losses (Score:2)
Who will be the client base in an era of permanent recession?
Yep that's the other major problem (Score:2)
This means that as sales dry up for companies they're going to do layoffs and that's going to increase unemployment so they're going to do more layoffs and so on so on so forth.
It's the end of capitalism. But without the cool Star Trek luxury gay space communism.
Instead you get feudalism but the peasants are treated even wor
Re: (Score:2)
Look at Russia's collapse in the early 90's. Do you think plumbers had it easier?
Re: That translates into job losses (Score:2)
Then they just bring people in from nations with too many people and pay them like they should be grateful to be paid at all.
Re: That translates into job losses (Score:2)
I think what you think of as recipients resenting handouts is commonly misunderstood. People have a basic need to feel like they are doing something worthwhile, which is traditionally fulfilled by them having jobs that pay them an amount that indicates how much other people value the work. Telling people they need handouts, then, indicates that they aren't capable of doing meaningful work. On the other hand, if people see that their work is valuable to people who can't afford to pay them a living wage (for
Configurators rather than Engineers (Score:4, Insightful)
Having consulted at a lot of these big businesses, I can tell you that a lot of the staff classified as "engineers" by CEOs in their posts & stock holder messaging, are in fact "tool configurators" that these orgs are using to setup, update, and modify the configuration of their internal tools, and a lot of last mile "solutions" for making clunky enterprise tools work well enough or often report well enough for internal middle management needs. I have no doubt that AI can help with these jobs more reliably than it can with full on coding. That being said, even these tend to build up tremendous technical debt within orgs with tons of bespoke naming, duplicate and repetitive automation, and new ongoing costs.
Tl;DR; Most big orgs often like to message to Wallstreet that these jobs are "the expensive ones" vs the reality of what they're really covering workwise.
Interesting juxtaposition (Score:4, Interesting)
According to the blurb, 95% of all code is done by people at 37 Signals. Whereas, Salesforce is claiming their internal AI tools have made their software engineers so productive, headcount hasn't risen.
While both can be true, it's an interesting to see differing opinions on how AI is or is not affecting coding.
Re:Interesting juxtaposition (Score:5, Insightful)
That opinions should be divergent is what should be expected. Current AIs have "jagged capability". If what you want fits where they're good, you can be overly impressed. If it fits where they're poor, you can be overly skeptical.
Actually, people have "jagged capability" also. Don't ask me to win at football. But we have reasonable models for people. We don't have reasonable models for AIs. Making the problem worse, different AIs have different capability profiles. I don't know how good Claude is at coding, but it's reportedly a lot better than Gemini. OTOH, there are other areas where Gemini is better. So you've got to pick the right tool for the right job.
This confusion is what should be expected. I remember the early days of computer use. FORTRAN and COBOL were used in *different* areas. Each one was supreme within it's own particular area. And assembler was used in yet different areas. You couldn't just pick a computer, you had to pick the appropriate computer, get it configured correctly, and you were still likely to have problems.
Re:Interesting juxtaposition (Score:4, Insightful)
I have very little exposure to Salesforce, but from what I've seen I suspect most of their software 'work' is catering to companies that have ever so slightly bespoke details around largely the same general flows. So LLM can probably do a decent job of rearranging their stuff to deliver a seemingly 'bespoke' solution for a customer that is pretty much never anything truly 'new', but just a tailored mix of things everyone has already done. Companies think their processes are unique and innovative and a tailored experience feeds that ego, even though it's more mundane.
Contrast that with people are used to only creating new code when they have no other option. If existing code is close enough, it's used. In that scenario, LLM is of relatively smaller utility.
Re: Interesting juxtaposition (Score:2)
From the looks of their products they don't have any competent engineers to begin with.
Re: (Score:2)
Salesforce are the most prolific liars about AI's effects on productivity, it's bad enough that it will probably earn them a lawsuit from their shareholders after the AI bubble pops.
No thanks (Score:1)
More effective = more work (Score:2)
And ... (Score:2)
So what was the point again?
Re: And ... (Score:1)
So... (Score:3)
Translation... (Score:4, Insightful)
"We spent so much money on this AI crap that while other companies are realizing they need more people to deal with the slop, we don't have any money left and we're completely boned, so we're raising our prices on salesforce."
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According to our rep at Salesforce the ticket system for submitting support requests is down because they switched to AI and now it will not work until we migrate to Hyperforce. Pretty skeptical about about how much their Agentforce and Einstein products sell too..
still waiting, Benioff (Score:2)
Let's hear an announce from that dunce that AI has made the Executive Suite so much more productive that Salesforce has no further use for him. Termination at the End-O-Week, and any crap left behind will be mailed to him.
Bull (Score:4, Informative)
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Not sure I totally follow the Jevon's Paradox argument with respect to software engineers, but I agree that demand has either dropped or is not growing.
And because so many CEOs, including Benioff went all in on how much AI was going to deliver, they have to claim that is in fact delivering.
This quote just combines those two problems into one neat, empty press quote.
Re: (Score:2)
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Super interesting explanation, thanks.
I have heard of Jevon's Paradox in cases like the introduction of LED lights, which did indeed create an explosion of use of lighting everywhere. I guess I've always thought of this in terms of latent demand (people actually wanted to light up more things than they could afford to). The way you're describing it sounds more like demand creation (people did even think about all the things they could do with lights until LEDs made them incredibly affordable).
I think in thi
It's horseshit and hype (Score:3)
deigned to sell the snake oil he's selling.
I see more and more corporate executive spending millions on this shit, because they are easily fooled. This bubble is going to pop, and its going to ruin the economy. Mark my words.
RIP Salesforce (Score:2)
If they can't figure out how turn more employees into more revenue, then someone else is going to end up hiring those people. Actually it's worse than simply being unable to figure it out, they don't understand that they are even supposed to be turning labor into money.
Blame-slump-on-AI move? (Score:1)
Congress should investigate these lies
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Can Salesforce customers read? (Score:5, Insightful)
If I were a customer of any company I relied upon for my business and I hear "hiring 20% more account executives this year" AND "Salesforce had reduced its customer support workforce by roughly 50%" this would be cause for concern and a signal I should probably be looking elsewhere.
Re: (Score:1)
'More Productive' (Score:2)
'More productive' HOW? More lines of code? More features completed? More bugs filed? More bugs fixed?
Unless I know exactly how he's measuring productivity, this means nothing at all. Maybe it's just 'more programmers are using AI', in which case he hit his metric, but I don't know how it translates into actual *work done*.
CEO slop, just like Bezos numbers.
keep going (Score:2)
Can't wait until I can simply ask AI to create a Salesforce clone. AI will know how because it already has the code.
salesforce is the oreos of CRM (Score:2)
The main takeaway here is that salesforce is out of ideas. If they had more ideas to work on, they'd hire more developers, with or without AI. Everyone already has salesforce, or has heard of it. Nobody wants new features. Just like oreo, what the customer really wants is for them to just stop changing it.
Good luck with that (Score:1)
Not necessarily a bad thing (Score:2)
Due to advancements in frameworks and development tools programmer productivity has been increasing for decades.
And employment and compensation have increased with it, because a more productive programmer means more tasks become viable.
What's happening now is that LLMs have caused a sudden productivity increase across the board, so for the moment there's more programmers than work available.
But the same fundamental economics are in play, software creation being cheaper means more software tasks will become