Marc Benioff, CEO and cofounder of San Francisco-based software giant Salesforce, recently ignited a firestorm after claiming that artificial intelligence does up to “50% of the work” at his cloud computing company.

Benioff’s comments on robot labor came after his company, San Francisco’s top employer, cut 1,000 positions this year. Salesforce is one of several companies across the tech industry that have had massive layoffs.  

Recommended Stories

• Google promoted content from hijacked local news website posting pro-China content
• Billions of login credentials have been leaked online, Cybernews researchers say
• Pope Leo XIV warns youth about dangers of AI

In May, cybersecurity software maker CrowdStrike announced it planned to lay off 500 employees, a move CEO George Kurtz said reflected the dominance of AI. 

“AI has always been foundational to how we operate,” Kurtz wrote in a memo included in a securities filing. “AI flattens our hiring curve, and helps us innovate from idea to product faster. It streamlines go-to-market, improves customer outcomes, and drives efficiencies across both the front and back office. AI is a force multiplier throughout the business.”

Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski said his company has cut its workforce by 40%, citing its investment in AI as a key factor. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy echoed a similar approach, stating that the tech giant plans to use AI to streamline operations and reduce headcount.

Benioff tried to put a positive spin on his comments by saying the labor bots taking over duties performed by humans freed them up so the human employees can “do higher value work.” 

“AI is doing 30 to 50% of the work at Salesforce now, and I think that will, you know, continue,” he said on Bloomberg’s The Circuit with Emily Chang. “All of us have to get our head around this idea that AI can do things that before we were doing, and we can move on to do higher value work.”

Benioff estimated that his software company has reached about 93% accuracy with AI technology.

“It’s pretty good,” he said, but it’s not “realistic” to hit 100%. He added that other vendors are at “much lower levels because they don’t have as much data and metadata” to build higher accuracy.

Benioff said Salesforce is marketing its AI tools on their ability to replace human labor, which raises ethical questions for the CEOs using them. 

“It’s a digital labor revolution,” he said. “We’re probably looking at $3 to $12 trillion of digital labor getting deployed. And that digital labor is going to be everything from AI to agents to robots. And I do think CEOs have to make sure their values are in the right place and that values bring value.”

Benioff’s comments that AI was doing up to 50% of the work at Salesforce were met with backlash, including some in his own company pushing back on his assessment. But to industry observers such as Professor Saikat Chaudhuri, faculty director of the Management, Entrepreneurship, & Technology Program at the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, Benioff was just stating the obvious. 

“There’s no doubt that AI agents are replacing, and will replace, a substantial chunk of the workforce,” Chaudhuri told the San Francisco Chronicle. 

Chaudhuri likened the current moment to the Internet Revolution. This era upended industries, from print media to brick-and-mortar retail, causing widespread disruption before ushering in a wave of new opportunities. “It became something that people had to acknowledge,” he said, noting that while some jobs vanished, new ones emerged.

SUPREME COURT TAKES UP GOP CHALLENGE TO FEC COORDINATED SPENDING LIMITS

Benioff’s enthusiasm for AI is far from unique. According to a new survey titled The Labor Market Effects of Generative Artificial Intelligence, 43.2% of firms nationwide now report using generative AI in the workplace, up 10% since December.  

“It’s increasing very rapidly, even surprisingly,” Jon Hartley, a policy fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and the survey’s lead author, said, adding that the results “have several implications for policymakers, businesses, and researchers navigating the evolving landscape shaped by the integration of Generative AI into the global economy.”