Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is hiring for just one role in the age of AI. Here’s the gig he is offering and why.
Job postings for Salesforce (CRM) roles are becoming hard to find in the age of artificial intelligence — unless you can close sales.
The insight: Salesforce co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff made one thing very clear on his late-Wednesday earnings call: Hiring decisions are more focused than ever inside a company long known for aggressive people additions.
“For the last couple of years, we have not been loading up a lot more engineers with Srini [Tallapragada, Salesforce’s chief engineer],” Benioff said. He noted that hiring in Tallapragada’s team of 15,000 engineers has been mostly flat for two years, as the company has leaned into AI efficiency and coding agents.
“We’re mostly expanding only in one area,” Benioff added. “You can see headcount has grown, but it’s mostly growing in [chief revenue officer Miguel Milano’s] area in sales because I think we all realize the one thing that we’re doing here with … selling and communicating [is] that agents are not exactly doing that. They can qualify OK. They can provide service. But in sales, we still scale because there are so many different parts of the market that we have to get to. So that will be a critical part of expanding our company, but at the same time, expanding our margins.”
Salesforce reportedly eliminated approximately 4,000 roles in its customer support division last September as part of its push toward agentic AI.
A tough earnings day for CRM: Salesforce delivered adjusted earnings of $3.88 per share against Wall Street’s expectation of $3.12, helped by an astonishing $27 billion in stock repurchases, which cut the share count by a whopping 10%. Revenue hit $11.13 billion, up 13% year over year and ahead of the $11.05 billion consensus.
The midpoint of Salesforce’s full-year revenue guidance came in at $46.05 billion, just a hair below the $46.12 billion analysts were penciling in, and that slight miss is why the stock didn’t jump higher in today’s session. (It’s currently barely up and was down more than 3% at one point.) Investors aren’t confident in how AI at Salesforce will translate to big sales and profits, and when.
For the current quarter, Benioff is calling for $11.27 billion to $11.35 billion in revenue against Street expectations of $11.36 billion — again, just a tick light — and in this market, where software stocks are already under the gun, even a whisker of a guidance miss is enough to give the bears something to work with.
The bottom line: Did Benioff just signal on his earnings call that he is open to thinning the engineering ranks this year, given how fast AI is driving productivity? It’s unclear, but it wouldn’t be a shocker given the pace of AI tools development and layoffs elsewhere in Big Tech.
