Salesforce seems to be doubling down on artificial intelligence (AI) to streamline workflows and automate tasks in a hard pivot that comes months after the enterprise software giant announced mass layoffs as part of its broader restructuring efforts.
Marc Benioff, the company’s CEO, has said that AI currently accounts for about 30 to 50 per cent of Salesforce’s work. “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,” Benioff said in an interview with Bloomberg.
His remarks come at a time when the tech industry is increasingly looking toward AI as a way to cut costs, boost productivity, and reshape workforces. Earlier this year, Salesforce reportedly laid off over 1,000 employees as it sought to restructure the company around AI.
The impact of AI on jobs has become a hot-button issue, amplified by warnings from tech CEOs themselves about the disruptive potential of the technology. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has said that AI may eliminate 50 per cent of entry-level white-collar jobs in the next five years.
Research studies and surveys have also echoed a similar concern. American think tank, The Brookings Institution, found that AI could replace more than half of the tasks carried out by entry-level roles, including market research analysts, sales representatives and graphic designers.
In another Bloomberg interview last month, Robin Washington, the chief financial and operations officer at Salesforce, had said that the company is hiring fewer software engineers due to productivity gains from artificial intelligence. “We view these as assistants, but they are going to allow us to hire fewer people and, hopefully, make our existing team more productive,” she said.
Benioff termed the rise of AI in the workforce as a “digital labour revolution.” He further revealed that Salesforce has reached about 93 per cent accuracy with AI. He said that it was not realistic to hit 100 per cent accuracy with AI. Other vendors are at much lower levels because they don’t have as much data and metadata to build higher accuracy, he added.
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Other tech companies such as cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike and Swedish fintech Klarna are also investing in AI while shrinking their headcount. Amazon will also use AI to reduce roles, as per the e-commerce giant’s CEO Andy Jassy.
As millions of students around the world, particularly in India, prepare to become software engineers—and many even consider studying abroad for their master’s degrees—their chances of landing a job at the world’s biggest tech companies are beginning to look slimmer, all thanks to AI.
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