The hottest new hires are no longer engineers — at least not at Salesforce.
Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, said during Wednesday's quarterly earnings call that the company's number of engineers has "been mostly flat" over the past two years at around 15,000, citing "new coding agents" with "dramatic capabilities."
But talking about Salesforce's growing head count, Benioff said, "it's mostly growing in Miguel's area, in sales," referring to Miguel Milano, Salesforce's president and chief revenue officer.
"Because, I think we all realize the one thing that we are doing here with you, selling and communicating, the agents are not exactly doing that," he said, adding that sales will be a critical arm of the company's expansion.
While Salesforce's sales representatives are safe, others are not. Benioff said in September that Salesforce had cut about 4,000 support roles, which AI agents would handle.
He's also been big on AI use within the company, saying earlier this month in an interview that Salesforce is projected to spend $300 million on Anthropic tokens on projects this year.
Benioff's comments come as Silicon Valley companies are slashing headcount because of AI.
Cloudflare cut roughly 20% of its workforce in May, citing "massive productivity gains" from AI usage, CEO Matthew Prince said during the company's first-quarter earnings call.
The fintech company Block slashed nearly half of its workforce earlier in the year, with CEO Jack Dorsey saying in a shareholders' letter that "intelligence tools have changed what it means to build and run a company."
Standard Chartered CEO Bill Winters went viral last week for saying he was replacing "lower-value human capital" — a comment he's since apologized for.
But executives have said that some jobs are not yet capable of being replaced by AI. Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn said in a podcast interview this month that AI can't match the work of his artists and designers, and he won't lower the quality of his app just to use AI.
Benjamin Todd, the president of the career research nonprofit 80,000 Hours, told Business Insider that many key tasks in jobs aren't automatable, and that workers should focus on "safe skills" rather than "safe jobs."
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Katherine Li is a junior reporter on Business Insider's West Coast business news team. She covers trade policies, tariffs, and business practices, with a particular interest in Tesla and how larger economic sentiments impact individuals. Previously, she was a newsroom fellow who wrote international breaking news and produced newsletters Semafor. Before that, she wrote about climate policies for The Lever, covered the AAPI community for the SF Chronicle as a freelancer, and wrote about the 2019 Hong Kong protests as an intern for The New York Times.She is an alumna of the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley, and a graduate of the international journalism program at Hong Kong Baptist University with minors in French and English literature. Email Katherine at [email protected] and follow her on Bluesky @katherineli.bsky.social. Expertise
- Trade policies & tariffs
- Economic & social policies in East Asia
- Business & innovative tech
- West Coast AAPI communities
Some of her best work include:Companies are struggling to fill manufacturing positions, let alone plan for what Trump's administration has in mindNightmare on Main Street: Trump's trade war is hurting American small businessesDOGE and economic uncertainty are coming for your work-life balanceCanadian grocery stores are sidelining US products — and American businesses are feeling the pinchPressure ratchets up from Trump administration, Musk, and allies ahead of planned Tesla Takedown mass protests
Aditi is a junior news reporter at Business Insider's Singapore bureau. She writes about Gen Z and millennial side hustles, careers, and retail and consumer behavior. She previously worked for The Straits Times, where she wrote breaking news stories for the Singapore desk. She studied communications and business at Nanyang Technological University. Aditi can be reached via email at [email protected]Featured stories:
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