Salesforce CEO, Marc Benioff, AI is Now Doing 30-50% of Work’

According to Marc Benioff, who is the Salesforce CEO, AI is doing more than 50% of the work at the company. His statement comes when the technology industry is looking to AI to cut costs, increase productivity, and change the horizon of the job market.

Marc Benioff has claimed that AI is doing most of the work in his company. This is close to a decent 30% to 50% of the company’s work. This comes at a time when the industry is looking at ways to cut costs, enhance productivity, and redefine the job market.

The company is making use of AI to smoothen its workflow, and of course, also automate their tasks. The statement comes at a critical juncture, where the company has made a recent announcement of mass layoffs.

This was done as a wider restructuring initiative. The CEO said, “Humans need to adjust to the fact that AI can handle tasks they used to do.” This was told in an interview that he had with Bloomberg. 

There is also a growing concern within the tech sector about AI’s transformative potential, particularly as it relates to workforce dynamics. The company had earlier this year laid off close to 1,000 employees to realign around AI-driven efficiencies. 

The negative impact that AI has had on employment has become a debated topic by several tech leaders. Some of them include Dario Amodei, who is the Anthropic CEO. He has warned that AI can eliminate more than 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs in the next 5 years. 

According to the Brookings Institution, AI can replace more than half of the tasks that are done by entry-level roles. Some of them are research analysts, sales representatives, and graphic designers.

Robin Washington, who is the chief financial and operations officer of Salesforce, in an interview with Bloomberg, said that the company is hiring fewer software engineers. This is because of the fact that AI is helping their company to be productive.

“We see AI tools as invaluable to allow us to hire fewer individuals.” However, she added that they are elevating the productivity of our current team.” Besides, AI has helped the company achieve an impressive 93% accuracy with its AI technologies. 

But gaining a 100% accuracy rate is not possible. She further noted that other companies can lag behind in accuracy due to a lack of sufficient data. This is when metadata was necessary to be able to reach higher performance benchmarks.

Furthermore, tech firms like cybersecurity pioneer CrowdStrike and Swedish fintech innovator Klarna are investing significantly in AI while concurrently reducing their workforce. Amazon’s CEO Andy Jassy has also indicated that the retail giant intends to leverage AI to streamline roles.

As millions of students worldwide, especially in India, prepare to embark on careers in software engineering, with many considering master’s degrees abroad, their prospects of securing positions at the largest tech companies are becoming increasingly precarious, largely due to the unstoppable rise of AI.