Salesforce CEO announces engineering hiring freeze, bets big on AI agents

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has confirmed the company will not be hiring new engineers this year, citing significant productivity gains driven by AI agents. This strategic shift signals a major bet on artificial intelligence to revolutionize the company's workforce and operations.

Benioff initially hinted at the hiring freeze during a recent appearance on The Logan Bartlett Show podcast, stating, "In engineering this year at Salesforce, we're seriously debating - maybe we aren't going to hire anybody this year. We have seen such incredible productivity gains because of the agents that work side by side with our engineers."

During the company's recent earnings call, Benioff solidified this stance, saying, "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."

Benioff justified the decision by pointing to a global labor shortage and the transformative power of AI in boosting software engineering productivity. "We are going through a global labor shortage where we see all these declining birth rates," he explained. "We can all agree that software engineering has become a lot more productive in the last two years with basically these new models."

For the quarter ending January 31, 2025, Salesforce reported a strong financial performance, with total revenue reaching $10.0 billion, an 8% year-over-year increase. Full-year revenue stood at $37.9 billion, up 9% year-over-year.

Benioff emphasized Salesforce's ambition to lead the "digital labor revolution," stating, "No company is better positioned than Salesforce to lead customers through the digital labor revolution. Our goal is to be the No. 1 provider of digital labor in the world."

Salesforce's widespread adoption of agentic AI has led Benioff to challenge conventional views on AI's impact on employment. He envisions a future where humans and AI agents collaborate seamlessly. "We're the last generation of CEOs to only manage humans," he said. "You know, I think every CEO going forward is going to manage, you know, humans and agents together."

A growing trend in tech

Salesforce is not alone in exploring the potential of AI to reshape engineering roles. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently predicted that AI could take over mid-level engineering tasks by 2025. Speaking on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, Zuckerberg acknowledged that while the shift will be expensive in the short term, it will yield long-term efficiency gains.