Benioff Says Salesforce Won't Hire Engineers This Year Due To AI (sfstandard.com) 37
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said his firm, San Francisco's largest private employer, does not plan to hire engineers this year because of the success of AI agents created and used by the company. From a report: "My message to CEOs right now is that we are the last generation to manage only humans," Benioff said Wednesday on Salesforce's earnings call, indicating that companies of the future will have hybrid human and digital workforces. Benioff added that Salesforce's mission is to become "the No. 1 digital labor provider, period" to other companies.
Oh look (Score:5, Insightful)
Cue the "AI won't replace humans" crowd.
Re: Oh look (Score:4, Insightful)
Right, because guy trying to sell you AI said so.
You remind me of middle managers that buy RPA tools because the RPA salesman told him that he won't need to hire software developers anymore. And now you're stuck with vendor lock-in on a product that doesn't scale.
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In the old days we have this thing called competition and it meant that you couldn't just sit on your laurels. But then we went all in on pro-corporate candidates because they were really really good at pushing our buttons and going booga booga booga with various moral panics. You know the one
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You are not considering the depth of la Presidenta's thinking accurately; there isn't any. He never gets beyond "I want", much like a 5 year old. His idea of a "deal" is that he gets everything you have and you get nothing. That's not a deal, that's appeasement. That doesn't even work in business, there he simply lied his ass off as evidenced by his conviction in NYS on the telling the State one set of numbers for tax purposes and telling banks another set of numbers to make off with their money.
And he does
Re: Oh look (Score:2)
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I've seen very little evidence AI is actually doing much damage to the jobs market. Historically these kinds of marginal productivity gains have been paired rapidly with an expansion of services offered. A developer that's 20% more productive ends up on the net expanding their productivity to 20% more customers. The market for software and automation is no where near saturated.
What has ample evidence is that as companies have refined remote infrastructure after covid they've begun offshoring large amounts o
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for prizes the ceiling fan was like 1/6 of the value of a car. Today that fan would be 1/100th of the cost of a vehicle.
I think that has more to do with the car than the fan. That fan hasn't changed much over the last 7 decades. Sure, some of the materials are a bit cheaper, but not worse, in fact improved -- more fire resistant.
But the car on the other hand...shit...
Re: what are you talking about (Score:2)
I've done more than that. When I bought my last house, the ceiling fans I bought weren't built for having separate switches for the fan and the light. Everything else about the fans was perfect for what I needed, so I took them apart and added additional wiring to make it work. That also meant taking apart the motor housing and other bits that normally come pre-assembled.
These also happened to be DC motor fans (quieter, much more energy efficient) they're actually made in America, and they included remotes.
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So it's not about not needing to hire developers at anymore. What this does is it makes your developers a good 20 to 30% more productive. That means you can hire 20 to 30% fewer developers and get the same results.
Either that or it allows a business to scale as if you had 30% more developers at 10% the cost. This is exactly how technology that increases productivity has inevitably worked. Have you ever bothered to ask yourself why, despite this happening repeatedly throughout history, more and more people end up with jobs anyways? Of course not, that would require higher order brain function that you don't have.
In the old days we have this thing called competition and it meant that you couldn't just sit on your laurels.
Which has what to do with your assertion that they need a third less developers? Oh that's right, nothing.
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Let's see whether that happens. There are indications using AI code assistants makes code less maintainable. If so, that could well eat all advantages and require hem to hire more engineers. This effect would take a bit of time to manifest, but could be pretty catastrophic as maintenance takes significantly more effort in a software's lifecycle than initial creation.
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I'm the "shrinking co. hides slump behind AI" crowd.
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Cue the "AI won't replace humans" crowd.
Oh look, indeed. A broad-spectrum ad hom aimed at suppressing discussion. Congratulations—you’ve managed to contribute precisely nothing by invoking that lazy, eye-rolling cliché. Instead of lashing out and ridiculing others preemptively, consider articulating a real argument—one that addresses the complexities of AI, job displacement, and human/AI collaboration. Otherwise, you’re merely proving that reflexive contempt is all you have to offer.
Weird (Score:3)
A company with less than stellar financials wants to not hire humans? I am shocked.
Re:Weird (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah. It is very important context that he said this on an earnings call when the stock got smashed by their bad projections.
"It's OK, because with these layoffs our own products will replace the people we fire to make up the losses."
I mean sure. Maybe. It's not impossible that will go well.
But the article is like "it's official, AI is coming for tech jobs." No. This makes absolutely nothing official, it is earnings call business as usual.
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Short the stock, another executive succumbing to the lie that AI is stable, productive, and without fault-- more so than the people that won't be hired.
Buying into that foam and goo, why do we need Benioff? His tutelage at the knee of Larry Ellison? How many gigajoules will Salesforce burn through GPU cores to find that his AI investments were fools-play?
Short the stock. Salesforce will find that others can play a similar game of reliance on unperfected, unproductive tech.
Just a matter of time (Score:1)
Thanks (Score:5, Insightful)
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Indeed. And everybody that had considered applying for a Job at Salesforce will remember this.
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Not a sociopath? They trained it on reddit comments.
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Except for the sociopaths are the ones who would "fix" the bad behavior.
Re: Replace the CEOs (Score:2)
The current CEO might not like being replaced though.
keep in mind (Score:1)
What does it mean to "manage an AI"? (Score:2)
You can't manage an AI. That doesn't make sense. It's like managing a hamster or a dolphin or a horse. The only thing you every manage is the *humans* who wrangle the AI/hamster/horse.
Sounds like it's time to migrate off Salesforce (Score:3)
Besides, we all know the best run terrible companies run on SAP. Or was that run away from. I get that confused.
Augmenting, not replacing (Score:2)
AI isn’t simply “replacing” humans but, rather, augmenting what we can do. Benioff’s remarks in the article underscore the reality: software engineers who don’t start using and mastering AI tools risk sidelining themselves. It’s reminiscent of buggy-whip makers stubbornly ignoring automobiles rolling off assembly lines.
As Benioff highlighted, Agentforce managed 380,000 customer-service conversations at an 84% resolution rate with minimal human oversight—and that
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Okay. Actually, based on the support cases we have placed with Salesforce in the past their support (which is supposed to be within an hour) is invariably very polite but quite lackluster and very slow. As in they seldom have information that will acceptably fill the lacuna in available information.
Haven't used AgentForce and frankly skeptical about whatever it is supposed to solve but you know what? If they provided an interface to an LLM trained on Salesforce customer support requests, KB articles and Sta
I can't wait (Score:2)