"It's pretty awesome": Salesforce on employing ZERO human engineers in 2025
"Hey, you know, we're the last generation of CEOs to only manage humans."
What could be better than building an incredible team of the finest human minds and using them to solve the greatest problems of our time?
Employing zero humans and saving huge amounts of cash by farming out their jobs to AI agents whose reliability is far from proven.
Or at least that's the hope of the increasing numbers of corporate leaders seeking to reduce headcount and ramp up the deployment of autonomous AI bots.
In an earnings call, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff gave us his view of a brave new people-free world that's now looming ominously on the horizon.
His company currently employs 75,000 people and 9,000 support agents, which have proved so effective in dealing with customers that Benioff sees an "opportunity to rebalance some of those folks into sales and marketing and other functions."
"We're really excited about that," he said in the earnings call. "I would say that we definitely have seen a lot of efficiency with engineering and with some of the new tools that I've seen, especially some of these high-performance coding tools."
The Salesforce CEO hopes to grow sales by up to 20% to meet "incredible levels of demand" as every other boss seeks ways to get their organisation's cash into AI and out of human salaries.
Growth agents - or agents of destruction?
"Every company who is our customer or prospect wants us to come in and start talking about what we're going to do with them and how we're going to transform them," Benioff continued. "Everybody sees the opportunity. The big message I have for a lot of CEOs that I meet with is: 'Hey, you know, we're the last generation of CEOs to only manage humans.'
"I think every CEO going forward is going to manage, you know, humans and agents together."
He's been meeting with CEOs across a huge range of industries including healthcare, life sciences and financial services, who are all talking about the AI transformation.
"It was a topic of conversation in every single person that I met with," he continued.
"They can see how agents are going to be able to augment their workforce. And I think you can see it also in the global economy that, I think, productivity is going to rise without additions to more human labour, which is good because human labour is not increasing in the global workforce.
"So, you have a stagnant human workforce worldwide. If you want productivity to go up, and you want GDP to grow up, and you want growth, I think that digital labour is going to be one of the catalysts to make that happen."
Perhaps unfortunately for us humans, Benioff also met with "a significant economist and economic leader" last week, who agreed that "something really dramatic" was happening.
Agentforce and the rise of digital labour
The Salesforce has a neat phrase to describe the change that's coming to human society.
"We're going to deliver the digital labour revolution," he said. "Our goal is to be the No. 1 provider of digital labour in the world. That's it. I don't think there really is another goal.
"And that is going to be the focus of fiscal year '26. As I said, this is the year of digital labour, and it is going to be the year where every trailblazer is going to become an agent blazer."
Salesforce is leading the way for the progress of our species with its plan to employ precisely zero human engineers in 2025.
So how does Benioff feel about this?
"It's pretty awesome," he said. "And we're not going to hire any new engineers this year. We're seeing 30% productivity increase on engineering, and we're going to really continue to ride that up. And we're going to grow sales pretty dramatically this year.
Despite the big talk, Salesforce actually missed revenue expectations for the quarter, earning $9.99 billion compared to the $10.04 billion analysts hoped for. Revenue is up 7.6% from the same period last year.
Adoption of its AgentForce platform has also been slower than expected, although growth is expected throughout the year.
Agentforce 2.0 is Salesforce’s AI-driven digital labour platform that automates tasks across departments with pre-built AI skills, Slack integration, enhanced reasoning, and workflow automation via MuleSoft, helping enterprises like Accenture and IBM boost efficiency and productivity.
Have you got a story or insights to share? Get in touch and let us know.
