Salesforce is "seriously debating" software engineer hires in 2025 due to the "incredible productivity gains" from agentic AIs

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As generative AI scales greater heights, job security is increasingly becoming a major concern among professions aside from potential existential doom. Last year, former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati indicated that AI would create new job opportunities while simultaneously killing some professions:

"Some creative jobs maybe will go away. But maybe they shouldn't have been there in the first place — you know, if the content that comes out of it is not very high quality."

Interestingly, with the rapid emergence of AI agents that can automate certain tasks and serve as virtual project managers, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff claims the company is seriously debating hiring engineers in 2025 (@tsarnick on X).

"We are going through a global labor shortage, we see all these declining birth rates. We understand that it's harder to hire, especially people right here in the United States in sales and service," Salesforce CEO, Marc Benioff, explained. "And this is going to give us the ability to do more. And as an example of that, look at engineering."

Benioff went on to state that Salesforce is looking at essentially freezing hiring for software engineers, owing to agentic AI. "I think in engineering this year at Salesforce, we're seriously debating maybe weren't gonna' hire anybody this year because we've seen such incredible productivity gains because of the agents that work side-by-side with our engineers, making them more productive. And we can all agree, software engineering has become a lot more productive in the last two years with these basically new models."

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Interestingly, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently echoed similar sentiments, indicating;

"in fact, the way to conceptualize the world going forward is everyone of us doing knowledge work will use Copilot to do our work and we will create a swarm of agents to help us with our work and drive the productivity of our organizations."

As you may know, users can create new agents through Copilot Studio and integrate them into Copilot. Organizations can also build tailored AI solutions to meet their specific wants and needs.

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Kevin Okemwa is a seasoned tech journalist based in Nairobi, Kenya with lots of experience covering the latest trends and developments in the industry at Windows Central. With a passion for innovation and a keen eye for detail, he has written for leading publications such as OnMSFT, MakeUseOf, and Windows Report, providing insightful analysis and breaking news on everything revolving around the Microsoft ecosystem. You'll also catch him occasionally contributing at iMore about Apple and AI. While AFK and not busy following the ever-emerging trends in tech, you can find him exploring the world or listening to music.

1 Comment Comment from the forums

larakurst

Salesforce is so unbelievably full of it. if you talk to any software engineers, they will tell you that LLMs cant replace software engineers.

if you've used an llm, then you know that the things that it's good at is one-off things that you need like. I need a python program that will manipulate multiple excel cell files that have badly labeled columns and stuff and synthesize the information and put it into one sheet

like that's the type of stuff it can do. if you are writing little things of code that have to interact with other people's code, or be efficient in the way that it works then it's no longer good because it can't remember all of that.

Salesforce is a classic Silicon Valley tech company. Their entire goal is to just get as many subscribers as possible and then to cut things out in order to reach profitability. what they do is they have a marketplace of developers, and then when you get salesforce, and it doesn't work, you tell your rep that it doesn't work and then they point you to 3rd party software engineers who are going to charge you like a hundred thousand dollars to correct or complete that piece of the application.

They're also going to buy competing software companies, an attempt to smash their code into salesforce, even if it doesn't really work very well. and normally they would have their own software to developers to fix that, but if you're using salesforce recently, you know that they are not using those developers that way, and apparently they're just getting rid of them
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