AI lacks human touch, says Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff; plans to add nearly 5,000 salespeople

Salesforce chief Marc Benioff said on Saturday that AI cannot replace employees in sales roles, adding that the job requires "human connectivity." Speaking to TBPN, a live daily YouTube show, Benioff said, "AI doesn't have a soul. It's not that human connectivity."


His remarks contradict the company's push for AI deployment. Salesforce, which remains San Francisco’s largest private employer with about 76,000 employees globally, has been pushing AI aggressively.


Per a report in today’s TOI, the firm is hiring between 3,000 and 5,000 employees in sales roles, hitting 20,000 account executives this year.

The hiring spree by the cloud computing firm comes months after Benioff made headlines for slashing his customer support workforce from 9,000 to nearly 5,000, adding that AI agents now handle 50% of customer interactions.

“All of us have to get our heads around this idea that AI can do things that before, you know, we were doing, and we can move on to do higher-value work,” Benioff had said earlier.

He explained that AI agents, which break down complex tasks into smaller steps and can independently complete assignments, have reshaped the company’s operations, as reported by the SF Chronicle.

“If we were having this conversation a year ago and you were calling Salesforce, there would be 9,000 people that you would be interacting with globally on our service cloud.” However, Benioff pointed out, “These large language models can do a lot of things, but they cannot do everything,” according to the SF Chronicle.

In another interaction, when asked by Bloomberg if AI could replace him one day, Benioff joked, “I hope so. I mean, of course, I'm partially kidding. You know that, but we're becoming more automated.”

In May, Salesforce acknowledged that its adoption of AI tools has enabled the company to scale back on recruitment.

During an analyst call in May, chief financial and operations officer Robin Washington said the company is reducing hiring, with 500 customer service staff being moved to other roles, an adjustment expected to save $50 million.