What just happened? Not every company is slowing down its rush to go all-in on AI – Salesforce certainly isn't. According to CEO Marc Benioff, up to 50% of work being done at the software giant is now performed by AI. Benioff had plenty of praise for the technology, but said little about how it will impact those it puts out of work.
Speaking in an interview on Bloomberg's The Circuit with Emily Chang, Benioff said "All of us have to get our head around this idea that AI could do things, that before, we were doing, and we can move on to do higher-value work." He revealed that about 30% to 50% of work being done at the company is now performed by AI.
Salesforce announced earlier this year that it was laying off 1,000 people as a result of its AI focus, something Benioff seems less keen to highlight. According to reports, the company will be hiring 1,000 extra people whose job will be to sell Salesforce's AI agent tech, Agentforce, to other firms, who will likely use it to replace some of their own workers. Benioff said the agents can perform tasks at around 93% accuracy.
Benioff isn't the only CEO to reveal how much company work AI is responsible for. CEO Satya Nadella recently said around 30% of Microsoft's code is now written by an AI, while Sundar Pichai said the figure was 25% at Google.
But some executives' stance toward AI has cooled recently, usually due to a public backlash against the technology. Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn previously said the firm would gradually stop using contractors to do work AI can handle, and that proficiency with the technology would become part of workers' annual reviews. But von Ahn said in May that he could not see AI replacing employees.
Klarna is another example of this trend. In 2023, CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski told OpenAI boss Sam Altman "I want Klarna to be your favorite guinea pig." The buy-now, pay-later firm has slashed it workforce by almost half in recent years and announced a freeze on hiring in December 2023 as it looked to pursue AI alternatives to humans.
Siemiatkowski changed his position in May, announcing that Klarna would once again be hiring humans as the AI replacements were producing a "lower-quality" output.
Ultimately, though, the mass job losses that many predicted would be caused by AI are happening, with Microsoft the latest to announce thousands of cuts as it invests $80 billion in AI. According to layoffs.fyi, 63,823 people from 150 tech companies have been laid off in 2025 so far.
Image credit: World Economic Forum