Salesforce boss slams "alarmist" AI jobs doom fears, celebrates "dramatic reduction in humans"
Marc Benioff, CEO, thinks white collar workers have a future after all - even though his firm is using millions of AI agents to do their work.
Salesforce boss Marc Benioff has rubbished recent warnings that AI could wipe out 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs.
Earlier this week, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei made the dire prediction that artificial intelligence would destroy half of the positions which allow young people to get their foot on the career ladder.
Now Beniott has claimed this forecast is too doomy (although he didn't use that exact word) and insisted that humans will still have a place in the working world for the foreseeable future.
" I'm a huge fan of Dario. He's great, amazing person. Incredible company, wonderful. But some of these comments, I think, are alarmist and get a little aggressive in the current form of AI today," he said in an earnings call.
"We're not exactly at that point where the computer... has human consciousness and to the point where it's running its own manufacturing facilities, creating its own rocket ships and launching itself [off] the planet.
"And, to that point, we aren't exactly even to that point yet where all these white collar jobs are just suddenly disappearing, because I think that we realise while AI can do some things [and] is very exciting in the enterprise, we all know that it cannot do everything. And it doesn't have the accuracy yet."
Agentic AI and a growing non-human workforce
However, Benioff also went on to talk about his firm's use of agentic AI in terms likely to alarm any doomer that fears the end of humanity is nigh.
He said that agents would complete their one millionth customer support conversation this year.
"It is a dramatic reduction in the amount of human beings who have had to get involved to answer customer issues," Benioff revealed. "I don't think any other tech company at scale has delivered this capability."
In an earnings call earlier this year, Benioff claimed Salesforce would employ zero new human engineers in 2025 and said: "It's pretty awesome."
But the king of corporate tech appears to have changed his tune.
During the latest call, he insisted that he is actually still creating jobs.
"We have so much opportunity. I can't hire as many people as I want right now... I have a lot of opportunity throughout the world, and that is held back by, wow, there isn't a lot of people to hire. It is actually surprising. So that is kind of the interesting point."
Beniof also crowed about buying Informatica for $8 billion and said "everybody knows I love" the company.
Salesforce earned $9.83 billion in Q1 revenue - an 8% year-over-year increase. It now has 4,000 paid customers for Agentforce - its platform for building and deploying autonomous AI agents - earnings $100 million in Agentforce annual recurring revenue (ARR).
Benioff added: "We're raising our fiscal year '26 guidance by $400 million to $41.3 billion at the high end of the range. I mean sometimes you have a quarter when everything is going right for you. That means revenue is going right. Bookings is going right. You're kicking off the quarter."
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