There had been signs that AI is becoming increasingly good at coding, and the impacts are now being seen in the real world.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has said that the company will hire no more software engineers this year because the gains from AI are making up for the need to add more employees. “We’re not adding any more software engineers next year because we have increased the productivity this year with Agentforce and with other AI technology that we’re using for engineering teams by more than 30% – to the point where our engineering velocity is incredible. I can’t believe what we’re achieving in engineering,” he said on a podcast. “We will (also) have less support engineers next year because we have an agentic layer,” he added.
But Benioff said that while the company won’t be hiring any more software engineers, it still expects to have more human employees in five years than it does today. “We will have more salespeople next year because we really need to explain to people exactly the value that we can achieve with AI. So, we will probably add another 1,000 to 2,000 salespeople in the short term,” he said.
Salesforce has been cutting its workforce in recent times. In January 2024, the company had let go of 700 employees, which represented 1 percent of its 70,000-strong workforce. Salesforce had also unveiled Agentforce, its flagship artificial intelligence product, which aims to help organizations integrate AI into their operations.
Salesforce isn’t the only company that’s said that it was not hiring human workers because of gains it’s seen from AI. Klarna had announced last month that it had stopped hiring humans because of advancements in Artificial Intelligence. ““I’m of the opinion that AI can already do all of the jobs that we as humans do,” Klarna’s CEO had said in an interview. “It’s just a question of how we apply it and use it. We stopped hiring about a year ago,” he had added.
In recent times, there have been several advancements in AI at software engineering tasks. Last month, OpenAI’s o3 model had scored a rank of 175 on Competition Code, implying that it was better than all but 174 human coders on the planet. Also, companies like Cursor have been integrating AI right into IDEs, while Peter Thiel-backed startup Devin has created a whole AI employee that is designed to replace humans. While it might be early to say whether AI will completely replace humans in software development roles, but it’s certainly becoming clear that it’s already helping human software engineers be a lot more productive, which could put downward pressure on demand for new software engineers in the coming years.