Marc Benioff

“They said AI would kill entry-level jobs. We're hiring 1,000 new grads & interns right now to ride the AI exponential — these grads & interns are building it, powering Agentforce & Headless360 at Salesforce.”

Marc BenioffCEO

Chair and CEO, Salesforce

Benioff made the pledge as a rebuttal to predictions that AI would eliminate entry-level white-collar work; Salesforce had cut around 1,000 roles in February 2025 and again in early February 2026.

“"We're not going to hire any new engineers this year. We're seeing a 30% productivity increase on engineering, and we're going to really continue to ride that up."”

Marc BenioffCEO

Chair and CEO, Salesforce

Salesforce held engineering headcount flat through 2025: Benioff said in May 2026 that the engineering organization had been stuck at roughly 15,000 people for about two years, and contemporaneous coverage (Fortune, WION) reported the company stopped hiring software engineers in 2025 while expanding sales by ~2,000 reps. The 30% productivity figure remains a self-reported, unauditable number, but the operative promise — no net new engineering hires in 2025 — held.

“The future of AI is agents, and it's here. Our vision is bold: to empower one billion agents with Agentforce by the end of 2025.”

Marc BenioffCEO

Co-founder, Chair and CEO of Salesforce

Salesforce never reported anything close to a billion deployed agents by the end of 2025; roughly fifteen months after launch the company was touting ~29,000 Agentforce deals and about $800M in Agentforce ARR, and disclosed adoption metrics (deals, conversations, 'agentic work units') rather than agent counts. Benioff quietly dropped the billion-agent framing, and tepid Agentforce uptake was reported as a drag on the stock through 2025.