No company has made as big a bet on AI agents as Salesforce. In fact, Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff almost changed the company’s name to “Agentforce” to reflect just how much its future depends on AI doing tasks for workers. And Benioff has not been afraid to eat his own dog…um, drink his own champagne. He calls Salesforce “customer zero” for its own products. AI agents now successfully resolve 85% of Salesforce’s customer service inquiries and qualify its own sales leads 40% faster than before the advent of AI.
Overall, Benioff says these AI agents are so effective that they are now doing 30% to 50% of all the work within Salesforce itself. As a result, Benioff has announced that Salesforce won’t be hiring any additional software engineers, customer service agents, or lawyers. But the company is hiring sales people and “customer success” employees. Why? Because it turns out that building AI agents effectively still requires a good deal of learning and support—so Benioff wants to make sure there’s more Salesforce folks out helping customers adopt the AI tech.
It’s just one example of why Benioff told Fortune that he doesn’t agree with prominent AI startup CEOs, such as Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, who have predicted AI will result in a huge displacement of white collar workers. Benioff says there will still be plenty of jobs for humans, but exactly what they are may shift. Earlier this month, Fortune sat down with Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff while he was visiting London. What follows is our conversation, edited for length and clarity.
Fortune: You’ve said that agents are now doing 30%-50% of work within Salesforce. What does that actually look like internally?
Benioff: I’m looking at every single function and asking: how do we become an agentic enterprise?
