In the latest episode of the 20VC with Harry Stebbings podcast, Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff announced a major decision: By 2025, the company will stop hiring new software engineer. Behind this decision, it is mainly due to the company's significant increase in engineering team productivity through its flagship artificial intelligence product Agentforce and other AI technologies, achieving more than 30%.
While discussing the size of employees over the next five years, Benioff pointed out that although the company no longer increases the number of software engineers, the overall number of employees may rise. He explained that although the demand for engineers has decreased, the application of AI technology has greatly improved engineering efficiency and the team's work speed is impressive. In addition, he also mentioned that the company will reduce the number of support engineers next year and instead increase sales staff in order to better convey the value brought by AI technology to customers.
Agentforce has become Salesforce's most important business focus at present. Benioff stressed: "At Salesforce, everything must revolve around Agentforce, which is the only important thing at the moment." He further explained that this AI platform has played a key role in improving the company's operational efficiency and customer service. As early as December, Salesforce’s Ben team tested Agentforce, and while the effectiveness of use varies according to the user’s level of experience, it helped the company significantly overall.
However, with the arrival of 2024, Salesforce employees are also facing some uneasiness. In 2023 and early 2024, the company carried out large-scale layoffs, laying off 700 and 7,000 employees, which sparked widespread concern among employees. In a letter, Benioff admitted that due to the excessive number of people hiring during the epidemic, current layoffs are one of the economic challenges that companies must face.
Although Benioff mentioned that Salesforce could expand over the next five years, employees remain uneasy about whether 2025 will repeat the layoffs in the previous two years. With the rapid development of AI technology, it remains to be seen what future Salesforce employees will face in this transformation.
Key points:
Salesforce will no longer recruit software engineers in 2025 as AI technology improves productivity.
The company plans to add sales staff to illustrate the value of AI to customers.
In recent years, the company has experienced multiple layoffs and employees are uneasy about the future.