AI does up to 50% of the job at Salesforce, says CEO Marc Benioff
Salesforce is increasingly relying on artificial intelligence to get its work done, with CEO Marc Benioff revealing that AI now accounts for 30 to 50 per cent of the company's operations. In an interview with Bloomberg, Benioff said that people must adjust to a future where AI performs many tasks that were once handled by humans. 'All of us have to get our head around this idea that AI could do things that before we were doing,' he said, calling it a shift toward 'higher-value work'. He described the change as a 'digital labour revolution'.advertisementThe push for AI adoption comes amid a wider trend in the tech industry, where companies are using automation to cut costs and improve productivity. Salesforce itself laid off over 1,000 employees earlier this year as it restructured to focus more on AI.Benioff said Salesforce's AI systems are delivering 93 per cent accuracy, although he noted that reaching 100 per cent is 'not realistic'. He added that other vendors struggle with lower accuracy rates because they lack the same amount of training data and metadata.
And this is not a trend that is unheard of. Other tech giants are also increasingly using AI to reduce human workload. At a recent earnings call, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said over 30 per cent of new code at the company is now generated by AI. This is up from 25 per cent in October 2024. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella echoed this, noting that 30 per cent of the code at Microsoft is AI-generated, with some projects possibly relying entirely on AI-written code.advertisementMeta CEO Mark Zuckerberg believes the shift will go even further. 'I think sometime in the next 12 to 18 months, we will reach the point where most of these codes that are going towards these efforts [Meta Llama projects] will be written by AI,' he said, claiming that AI is already at the level of a mid-level engineer.Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently predicted that within six months, 90 per cent of all code will be written by AI. OpenAI's Sam Altman has made a similar claim, saying that AI already generates about half the code in some companies.Companies like Shopify and Duolingo are going even further by actively replacing human workers with AI. Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn said this week the company would stop using human contractors for jobs that AI can handle. Shopify's CEO Tobias Lutke has told teams to justify new hires by proving that AI cannot do the job. 'Reflexive AI usage is now a baseline expectation at Shopify,' he said. Earlier this month, Meta also said that it plans to replace its human-led product risk assessments in favour of AI-powered automation.Meanwhile, at Klarna, which earlier cut nearly half its workforce, CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski warned that AI adoption could lead to a short-term recession due to the displacement of white-collar jobs. 'I don't see how we could avoid that,' he said.advertisementDespite these concerns, some tech leaders argue that AI will create new opportunities. Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, urged young people to embrace AI as a powerful tool that could lead to more valuable and creative roles.Meanwhile, tools like Anthropic's Claude are making it easier for individuals to create AI-powered apps without deep technical knowledge. Its latest update allows users to build, host and share apps directly while chatting with Claude, handling the complex parts like scaling, prompt engineering, and API management.- Ends
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