The public nature of the announcement is certainly marketing for our AI offerings as well, but at this point I think most engineers are just worried there will be additional layoffs, in the event management cannibalizes product for short term stock gains again.
This definitely reads more like a “everything is going AWESOME ignore anything else you hear about us” PR-ese.
I read this as messaging to shareholders more than anyone else (and sure some word-spreading about the product).
One ad shows a restaurant seating customers in the rain because they aren't using AI. The other ad shows someone buying clothes that don't match because AI wasn't suggesting them. (They also serve the customer shrimp, which he doesn't like.) Looking at weather forecasts and rescheduling reservations has nothing to do with AI, and I doubt AI can do anything other than write the "we're sorry" message. (Additionally, most restaurants simply ask what food you want before preparing it, so they don't have to worry about feeding you something you don't want.) Meanwhile, choosing matching colors for multiple articles of clothing is at most a satisfiability problem, which again has nothing to do with AI. I also doubt the sales floor staff needs any help with that. There are a fixed number of SKUs and colors. If a customer says "I like this shirt, can you suggest pants", I feel like 98% of adults would be able to competently assist. They also don't get paid very much, so it's unclear what the Salesforce value add is there.
IBM also does a bunch of AI advertising and the gist is that it is being used for air traffic control. Somehow, I doubt that. If AI could replace one pilot on 10% of flights, the airlines would make millions of dollars. They all still have 2, though.
I'd love to see a case study from someone other than the AI vendor. The ideas in the TV commercials aren't even good. Would love to see "well actually we're making a ton of money thanks to these products". The reason we're not seeing it is because it isn't happening.
There’s other things going on though this will help spin.
There’s no way that productivity metric includes the last 2-4 months.
No way in the world they got 30% gains. 5 maybe realistically
So I'm betting they got 30% gains in e.g. "OCRing" and quote that, ignoring that the OCR part is 1% of an entire process chain.
I have doubts that will ever happen, but who knows?
Sales folks are highly-compensated, so even making a few of them redundant (or making existing salespeople more efficient) would be a big win for companies (Salesforce's customers).
According to Wikipedia the companies they have purchased since 2023: Airkit.ai, Spiff, Own, PredictSpring, Tenyx.
I’ve seen SFDC hiring managers advertising positions on LinkedIn hiring SWEs as recently as last month
I don’t believe that companies would be stupid enough to kneecap their own growth because a SaaS company that has stopped innovating 5 years ago decided they are happy with their current headcount and used AI as an excuse.
(And it's not true - if you could "replace engineers with AI" we engineers would have already done it and be relaxing while AI does our work)
Salesforce came into discussion as a CRM solution for us, but the salesman was so arrogant that he was quickly booted out. If first thought it would be nice to develop against a more modern system, but today I am glad we never jumped on that train. And I hear it devolved into the same mess that CRM systems somehow always seem to be.
As for the time it saves-Sure, AI saves plenty of time, but in a big company most of the time isn't spent on coding. It's spent on collaboration, code reviews, meetings, debugging, looking at production logs, using internal tools, etc.
2020: the first AI craze, introducing “Einstein” as their name for their analytics platform, and officially changing the corporate vision to being the “No. 1 AI CRM company”.
2021: Now it’s all about “Customer 360”, i.e. account-based marketing, i.e. what basically everyone else does without such a memeable name. You wouldn’t believe the number of slide decks I had to sit through with all our little product logos orbiting this stock art character straight out of Women Laughing While Eating Salad.
2022: Never mind, now we’re betting the company on a real-time unified database called Genie, which was neither real-time nor unified (and eventually not called Genie either). Got sued for that one.
2024: AGENTS. AGENTS EVERYWHERE. WE ARE AN AGENT COMPANY NOW.
So, let’s see how this holds up in the face of the next hot thing.
This is how they operate. Just one marketing hype moment after another. The actual product doesn't really matter (and in a lot of cases doesn't even launch). They just need to keep making pretty slide decks filled with meaningless buzzwords so their customers get distracted from the fact that they are paying $500+ per user per month for a shitty web UI on top of 4 database tables.
Oof, I felt that cut in my bones and I was only a customer.
I'm surprised there hasn't been a Salesforce AR/VR.
It's telling that Benioff used to work at Oracle.
https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=sf.c360_a_data_...
And the higher the people in the pyramid are the better they are at selling their ideas in their neverending quest for recognition, fat bonuses and promotions.
And once they get them, more often than not by doing pointless and even harmful work, they can then leverage it by jumping to another company.
Gervais' principle at its finest.
Saleforce did not really suffer when NFTs died or blockchain become uncool because by then they had a new trend to promote.
The window of opportunity for this is now: people seem to believe the 'agents' are something really quite new and different, and we haven't yet reached the peak of the hype curve. (Whereas in the boring, backwards enterprise companies salesforce is very active in we are past the peak hype for LLMs/RAGs and its hard to sell that).
A bit ironic he says he will hire 2k+ sales staff though, considering part of their pitch for agentforce is it will handle any customer interactions, sales included.
I guess they are building a saleforce at the expense of everything else !
"We have to hire thousands of salespeople to sell this AI agent"
Something doesn't compute
AI is so good that everything can be automated, except for sales which needs a personal touch.
Wall Street happy, bonus for all execs, the end.
This feels like one of those things where you're having to explain things so hard that it should give you a clue you're duping yourself. People don't get it? We just need more salespeople to explain it more. Gotta keep those KPIs up.
And holy fucking shit has AI made every single interaction with a company ten times more painful and time consuming. It’s the worlds most boring video game where you had to trigger the right sequence of words with some dumb robot, only then to get placed into a queue of one of five remaining humans who themselves are just reading a script.
The other day I had to beat the first barricade of AI chat to get in the human queue, and then it took them literally five hours to reply. I got a text at 1am.
There is nobody who when connected to some AI agent thinks “great this will solve my problems quickly!” It’s just “wow they figured out a new way to screw us”.
Huh. So they are telling customers that they'll make their work more AI driven while staffing up their own human sales?
It feels like mixed messaging about whether AI is actually good.
At least it will be interesting to see which pushes civilization off the cliff first, end-game capitalism ouroborosing itself or the direct impact of climate change (which is obviously also related in any case).
Why would you need buyers or even sellers? Why even have humans in the loop at all for any business process or transaction.
My understanding from all the magazines at my dentist office is that AI will replace the whole thing.
What’s even the point of humans? It’s just AI bots jerking each other off all the way down!
…now my head hurts.
I also don't know how he is pulling the "AI is making our engineers 30% more effective" stat when last I checked software engineers at Salesforce weren't even allowed to use AI.
confirmed. Take a look at this marketing material
https://www.salesforce.com/agentforce/ai-agents-roi-calculat...
They literally advertise their AI thing under the pretense of how many people you can fire and how much money you will save.
Apparently their technology is simultaneously an AI that solves business problems as well as an AI that builds AIs that solves business problems
SalesForce, SAP, and the other purveyors of steaming legacy enterprise excrement simply point the finger at the client when end-users can't accomplish basic tasks with their systems. And of course they're prime go-tos for government work. I don't wish unemployment on their people; but the faster their monolithic junk fades away, the better.
Is Salesforce garbage? Is that just how CRM systems are? Is everybody just doing it wrong? What's the deal?
These kinds of tools cover 80% of what you want to do out-of-the-box.
For the remaining 20% to build it correctly you need to either hire expensive consultants or hire in-house staff to build.
Nobody budgets properly for this, and it isn't in the sales pitch, and so that last 20% is built as horrible spaghetti code by the cheapest possible devs / consultants.
Even if you wanted to pay good salaries and hire people in-house how many great engineers want to be limited to programming in Apex on salesforce?
One, the salesforce data changes all occur through APIs (ok) which various enterprise integration tools (Informatica, Mulesoft, etc) support (ok), but those tools typically dont support easy options for retrying a change to a specific row that causes an error. If you are updating 100 Accounts in a single Salesforce Bulk API call and "5" are busy/locked, you have to build a lot of custom error handling to notice and retry just those 5 rows. Its not part of most connectors or python libraries I've seen. Also, 3 of those errors might be fatal and 2 might be retriable but you have to learn which are which or blindly retry them all. In database terms, their API transactional semantics are not statement by statement ACID but row by row within an API request.
Second, no API or SOQL operations can pull back or process or update more than 50,000 rows.
Given those two things, unless the integration person is skilled about both error handling and testing, some of the object busy/contention failures only show up in production traffic with many jobs going on so a generic integration specialist doesn't know about these Salesforce-specific pitfalls and they are discovered after the integration goes live under strange production access patterns.
EDIT: a third issue is that most Salesforce developers are UI-centric in their thinking and training and don't have database or data modeling or data integration experience to draw on so the troubleshooting for data issues on their end tends to suffer.
Their overly complex object/row/field permissions is a hot mess. Mulesoft is limited; there is a reason why they tried to buy Informatica.
Their marketing and hype machine hurts their credibility imo.
Let's see Benioff put his money where his mouth is, replace some C-suite seats with AI agents. Those are the really expensive salaries, and if AI is as smart as he claims it's downright reckless and negligent not to do this.
AI hype is exactly what I'm talking about.
I imagine if you demonstrate that you can have AI agents as viciously competitive COOs, CFOs, and CTOs, who never need time off, never sleep, it would be something that would set Wall Street on fire.
How can you replace a job that involves stone cold deterministic thinking and copying the behavior of your peers after a 3-6 month review with a lifeless machine?
If we take at face value that AI can “replace” a software engineer, it can most certainly replace most of the managers and executives above that role.
AI could largely already fill the role and fulfill all responsibilities at expected level of any C suite or management only position better right now than it could a software or operational position.
Their position is fundamentally easier to do for an AI compared to operational and labor roles. They are given data and output a decision or course of action. But since they largely aren't the ones implementing said action plan it's perfectly suitable for an AI.
C suites and execs are going to do all they can to ever avoid mentioning this though.
2. The productivity gains of 30% are probably overstated, in a likely effort to try and sell their AI products
I am doubtful as well.
I could imagine 30 percent among certain engineers for certain tasks, especially if you use a popular language with popular libraries and frameworks that are well-represented in the training dataset. I don’t know how typical of a codebase Salesforce has. They could also finetune a model on their own codebase or devote a small team of engineers to figuring out which prompts, models, etc. work best for their codebase and process. In theory, those advantages could boost it beyond what testing would typically show.
But a consistent increase of “more than” 30 percent across the whole engineering workforce seems less plausible, especially lacking details on how they measured that and uptake numbers. Edited to add: Are they even confident that their engineers are using it consistently? At this scale, that’s not a given.
I’d be interested to know whether Salesforce customers have noticed a change in the number or scope of features being announced. A change of this size seems like it should be noticeable from the outside. I’d like to hear from the engineers in particular.
In short, you could have agents that code at 2x but it would have only a small impact on deliverabkes since non-coding processes have a higher impact on velocity.
it maybe not, LLMs deliver clear value in coding tasks, but the thing is that competitors also will have gains, deliver more features, fixes and products.
Even if 30% productivity gains are true, they are probably not because of AI. They could have fired a bunch of low performers and overworked the rest of the engineers to achieve productivity gains, but even then, I’d be very skeptical if the 30% gains would stay there long term.
Pretty old trick.
This is like the opposite of 2021 where every tech company went on a wild hiring spree (remember how well that went?). Now in 2025 tech companies are just going to stop hiring anyone. I suspect by 2026 they will have a bunch of slop AI spaghetti code that no one can maintain. I'm starting to question whether this field is worth it anymore
Yes, that does stand to reason, it's the funniest bit about it. When you make engineers more productive the value of an engineer goes up, not down. Otherwise we'd have no game developers left after people went from writing assembly to working in modern game engines.
As others have pointed out it's obviously just a really cringy attempt at trying to sell their AI software, which apparently isn't smart enough to sell itself
Product can come up with and design features an order of magnitude faster than developers can implement them.
In practice established products have deep backlogs full of bugs and features that never get actioned.
If AI makes you 30% more efficient at coding (it might if you went from having literally 0 code completion or any form of AI to state of the art, not many people are doing that):
* 1 engineer = 50% feature dev (1x), 50% other
* 1 engineer with AI = 50% feature dev (1.15x), 50% other
So engineers are theoretically getting 15% more done. If your company is growing faster than 15%, you're probably still going to need to hire eng.
The real way SalesForce is going to increase productivity is by forcing more unpaid overtime, not by AI.
Engineers productivity is not linear, both over time and team size. In fact there may be productivity improvements just be freezing hiring as adding too many people becomes net negative if the architecture and domain complexity does not support. Also, writing code is not the bottleneck on value, it's making the correct changes that adds value. While AI can accelerate simple and repetitive code production, this could easily add more technical debt and be net-negative producing over time if engineers aren't thinking about the big picture. On the other hand AI could add a lot of value not directly related to coding as it can process and "understand" more breadth of information (including code) that can magnify engineers productivity if used thoughtfully, but that may have no direct relationship to coding per se.
I wish CEOs would avoid such phrasing unless "take responsibility for that" involves some personal penalty, like a lower bonus or some other way to compensate for the fact that a bad decision cost the company money.
Most SFDC projects I’ve seen recently are over budget and behind schedule on delivery.
Sounds like a nightmare. Replacing engineers with sales people trying to sell the AI. The pressure to sell is going to be tremendous, they hype will be incredible. And at the same time they are at a huge risk of sailing into the winds of the AI valley of disillusionment. Studies have shown that so far customers already find AI sales pitches a significant turnoff. They better hope customers really want whatever their AI actually does or their competitors are going to skate right past them with real actual products and features.
If you know how to build great products, now's the time to cast your line. It won't be easy, but I think there will be a lot of very happy small teams/soloists making money hand over fist (for them) over the next few years.
So why can’t AI explain that? I would think Salesforce customers are more about sales then development. Their AI can’t sell?
AI is being blamed for layoffs and hiring freezes but the reality is that selling software is not as profitable for companies.
https://www.salesforceben.com/salesforce-will-hire-no-more-s...
and when opened the salesforce career page they are still hiring for software engineers in 2025.
https://careers.salesforce.com/en/jobs/jr265886/software-eng...
I doubt the authenticity of source and also i work very closely with AI-agents and this is not the case as it is represented on social media.
The engineering org's productivity pain points aren't ever going to be solved by AI magic, or at least certainly not on the core CRM product.
AI has increased my productivity greatly, but it is a long way away from replacing my Job. Though maybe I am biased.
The company seems like a gigantic hot air balloon, so it might as well use "AI".
You just got at your desk after scuba diving vacation pop into a Salesforce Agent and find the joy of unlimited workforce, Product Specialist Agent, Recruitment Agent, Slack Agent, integrate your Tableau data, your CRM data, your email data, your slack data into a big Salesforce Black Data Hole and lose your job in the next iteration.
Just because greed has no limits and optimized vertical integration is inevitable. I am loving it. And waiting for my UBI and social rating AI QBR/KPI.
The ultimate corporate suicide in action. Agent Smith incoming.
https://careers.salesforce.com/en/jobs/?page=1&team=Software...
It seems they are still "hiring"
If you're seeing software engineering job results in Salesforce, then we can only assume the software engineering jobs listed there are either:
1. Posted last year by Salesforce (can go at any time)
2. Fake Ghost Jobs (more likely)
If you work as an engineer at Salesforce, start to look elsewhere before they intentionally lay you off.
AFAIK, each job is only posted for 2 days to meet the minimum legal requirement for the PERM
As I was predicting... [0]
The first affected are the "support engineers" then they will try to get away with going after everyone else at the company. Test subjects are needed for a trial run.
So what eventually happens to the existing employees when the AgentForce gets even better?
Can they just admit that they are replacing workers with AI agents instead of this newspeak bullsh*t?
I can see things like update my profile. Or give me a quote for this insurance product.
I fail to see how Agentforce or AI in general means less software engineers are needed. The only explanation I can think of is he is contracting with OpenAI or Anthropic or someone else and implementing that. My experience with SF Einstein or Genie has been like “you gotta be kidding if that is what you are selling”.
That is my understanding of these AS/GI agentic wizards anyway. They’ll fire the rest of their staff right after the thing fixes all the slowness.
You don’t even need to define “slowness” in your prompt! It just knows what “slowness” means and fixes it for you! It’s truly remarkable technology. Those primadonna devs will be out on their ass any day now.
All hail our agentic future!
Currently many efforts are driven by some level of leadership trying to justify their continued employment. This isn't just a salesforce problem.
Why? Because if AI is really all that then entire companies like sales force go away. All the customers who use sales force would need to do is hire one of these laid off engineers to ask AI concrete them a free sales force.
I don't ever see someone say "we're not hiring anymore customer support" or HR, or janitorial staff, or middle management.
When they announce they aren't hiring any more software engineers they are basically telling its own engineers to leave now or face cost cutting measures.
If you work at Salesforce, I would start putting out resumes now. The play seems to be to use the narrative "agents replaced our engineers, we cut %X of our team" as both a sales pitch and excuse for poor deliverables.
30% increase in productivity would mean another 100+ engineers should also be 30% more productive.
https://careers.salesforce.com/en/jobs/jr265886/software-eng...
this was the post https://www.salesforceben.com/salesforce-will-hire-no-more-s...
So i doubt the sales force CEO said that actually.
13k employees in Hyderabad alone. That's 18% of their employees. So about 27%
Which one? All of them I’ve used produce incorrect code 90% of time.
https://careers.salesforce.com/en/jobs/?page=1&team=Software...
Welcome to the meat grinder.
And yet I don't see anything about him stepping down. I never do.
their purpose is to extract money. salespeople like to know that money is being spent on them because that's how they measure value, and will continue to demand salesforce for as long as it is expensive.
He's lying. They are hiring. They just refuse to hire you if you were born in America
The "AI" craze is cover. It doesn't do jack shit. He knows too
https://substack.com/home/post/p-153688691 (not my Substack but has a good overall view of what's going on)
