Marc Benioff says AI might even replace him one day. And he’s fine with that

Artificial intelligence isn’t just a feature at Salesforce anymore — it’s apparently part of the workforce. According to CEO Marc Benioff, AI is now handling up to half of the company’s total work, from engineering and support to marketing and analytics.

“AI is doing 30 to 50 percent of the work at Salesforce now,” Benioff said in a candid interview with Bloomberg’s Emily Chang. “And I think that will continue.”

Benioff, long a tech optimist and evangelist, is now positioning Salesforce at the forefront of what he calls a “digital labor revolution” — a sweeping shift in how work gets done, powered by AI agents, data, and automation.

A new co-worker: AI

Benioff described a recent strategy session in which he wasn’t working alone — or even just with another executive.

“I just finished writing the business plan for this year, and I always do that with someone else,” he said. “For the last three years, I’ve also found a new partner in AI. So I have an AI partner, I have a human partner, and it’s the three of us who are writing the plan together. It’s a little less lonely at the top.”

That plan includes Agent Force, Salesforce’s platform of AI-powered “digital employees.” These agents are already being deployed to handle everything from customer service and marketing to analytics and sales support.

“These agents… are out there doing this work,” Benioff said. “Servicing the customer, selling the customer, marketing to the customer… partnering with me to do the analytics, the marketing, the branding.”

From chatbots to staff cuts

Salesforce's embrace of AI isn’t just philosophical — it’s operational. The company has cut over 1,000 roles in 2024, part of a broader restructuring effort to focus on AI-driven automation. While some laid-off employees may be retrained or redeployed, the reality is clear: jobs are shifting fast.

Benioff was frank about the implications. “We’re probably looking at three to twelve trillion dollars of digital labor getting deployed,” he said. “That digital labor’s going to be everything from AI agents to robots.”

The company isn’t alone. Tech giants from Amazon to Klarna have also made significant headcount reductions, attributing much of the change to AI adoption.

Still, Benioff maintains that AI isn't just about doing the same work faster. He argues it’s about freeing humans up for higher-value tasks.

“All of us have to get our head around this idea that AI can do things that, before, we were doing,” he said, “and we can move on to do higher value work.”

A Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University study published in February found that AI can hamper its users' critical thinking abilities, leading to "the deterioration of cognitive faculties that ought to be preserved."

Inaccuracies and ethics

Benioff says Salesforce’s AI models have reached about 93% accuracy in internal and customer-facing conversations — a figure he’s proud of, but one he acknowledges isn’t perfect.

“You’ll never see me saying that we’re at 100 percent,” he said. “But I think for a lot of the other vendors, maybe they’re at much lower levels because they don’t have as much data and metadata.”

He warned that businesses need to remain “completely paranoid” about security, noting there’s “no finish line” when it comes to safeguarding AI systems. As for hallucinations and false outputs — still common in many generative AI systems —Benioff said there's hope that stacking models will improve truthfulness over time, but accuracy remains a moving target.

And while he half-jokingly entertained the idea of being replaced by an AI himself — “I hope so,” he said with a laugh — Benioff emphasized that "values" must remain central to how companies implement this technology. The executive did not specify the values to which he was referring.

“CEOs have to make sure their values are in the right place,” he said. “And that values bring value.”

A not-so-distant future

With about 5,000 customers already using Salesforce AI agents, Benioff says the company is on track to reach one billion deployed agents by the end of the year — a figure that reflects just how rapidly automation is scaling.

“This is by far the fastest growing, most exciting thing we’ve ever done,” he said.

And if Benioff is right, it’s just the beginning. As AI reshapes and upends the workplace — from C-suites to call centers — Salesforce may be offering a glimpse of what the new normal looks like.