While many companies that went all in on AI have since pulled back, Salesforce is going full steam ahead. In an interview with Bloomberg, CEO Marc Benioff claimed that as much as 30% to 50% of the company’s work is now completed by AI—though no word on how much of his role personally has been made redunant or how much of his $39.6 million in compensation that he’ll be giving up.
“All of us have to get our head around this idea that AI could do things that before, we were doing, and we can move on to do higher value work,” Benioff said. In the case of some of Salesforce’s employees, the whole “move on to do higher value work” thing will have to happen somewhere else. Earlier this year, the company announced that it was laying off 1,000 people. It also reportedly plans to hire another 1,000 who will be focused on selling the company’s own AI agent technology, Agentforce. Put another way, Salesforce is hiring real people to sell other companies on adopting AI to replace some of its human workforce, which certainly seems like it would be one of the ten plagues of late-stage capitalism.
Benioff and Salesforce are far from the only firm that is signaling that they will push for the AI revolution, whether it’s ready or not. Earlier this month, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy sent a letter to employees talking up the use of generative AI across the company’s workflows, while slipping in a little note about how AI will lead to Amazon needing “fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today.”
That seems to be the underlying message of much of tech’s embrace of AI: get ready for layoffs. Silicon Valley has gone from bragging about how many jobs it can create to bragging about how small it can shrink its workforce.
Microsoft is in the midst of a second round of layoffs, per Fast Company, after already cutting its staff by 6,000 in May and shifting lots of money into AI investments. Other companies like Google and Bumble have been trimming people from departments within their firms, as well. According to Layoffs.fyi, the tech industry has laid off more than 63,000 workers in 2025 so far.
Oftentimes, whether it’s made explicit or not, corporate adoption of AI is the underlying reason for the cuts. Brian Merchant, author of Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech, recently spoke with tech workers who have been affected by AI and found that the technology is reshaping jobs and workforces as a whole. An employee of CrowdStrike told Merchant that while the company positioned its recent layoff as cutting underperforming employees, many of them were new hires who the company decided were replaceable. “AI has literally killed many jobs at CrowdStrike this week.” Another at Dropbox said that their team that focused on improving the service’s reliability was let go in favor of promoting a new AI-powered tool.
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