AI does 50 per cent of the work at Salesforce but don't fear mass layoffs yet, CEO Mark Benioff says
The Salesforce chief is clear and firm in his belief that AI should be seen as a means of increasing output rather than reducing headcount. Notably, Salesforce has already fine-tuned its operations with AI capabilities. In a recent Financial Times op-ed, Benioff revealed that 25 per cent of Salesforce's new code in the first quarter of 2025 was AI-generated. He also noted that customer service agents using the company's AI platform, Agentforce, resolved 85 per cent of incoming queries. According to Benioff, these improvements have enabled teams to work more efficiently and build stronger relationships with customers.Despite this broad adoption of AI tools, Benioff is clear that AI is reshaping Salesforce from within. He emphasises that, rather than cutting jobs, the company is rethinking how work is organised — breaking roles into distinct skills and helping employees transition into new, AI-augmented functions.While Benioff does not dismiss the potential disruptions AI may bring, he suggests that job roles will continue to evolve as AI capabilities grow, and that fears of large-scale job displacement are overstated. Rather than eliminating jobs, he argues, AI is prompting a rework around what humans need to do, with the need for many roles to be restructured around new skill sets.- Ends
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The Future Is Not Waiting The pace at which GenAI is evolving will not slow down. OpenAI's GPT-4 Turbo has already redefined multimodal engagement, and Google's Gemini is actively being embedded into consumer products at scale. The systems are improving. The expectations are rising. In such an environment, hesitation is not caution. It is irrelevance by another name. Marketing as we knew it is not coming back. But what can replace it—if we choose to build it—is something more rigorous, more intelligent, and far more consequential. The future of marketing in India will not be defined by how well we use AI. It will be defined by how deeply we understand what only humans can do—and have the courage to do more of it. (The author is managing partnet, Gnothi Seauton. Opinions are personal)
