Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, who is known for highlighting the transformative power of artificial intelligence, said AI can either replace us or enhance us.
He thinks it must be the latter.
That’s because humans have a “superpower” that AI doesn’t, namely the ability to express compassion or truly connect with other people, he added.
Those uniquely human advantages have given rise to history’s greatest inventions as well as the formation of businesses that seek to solve the world’s problems.
Even with the emergence of AI agents that can learn and carry out tasks for us, Benioff maintained they will enhance, not replace, humans.
Still, he acknowledged AI is driving immense change across businesses, including his own. For instance, AI agents managed by humans are resolving 85% of customer service queries, and 25% of net new code for research and development was generated by AI in the first quarter.
“Jobs will change, and as with every major technological shift, some will go away—and new ones will emerge,” Benioff added. “At Salesforce, we’ve experienced this first-hand: Our organization is being radically reshaped.”
Thousands of employees have been redeployed, and hiring for engineering roles has largely been on pause, he explained. In fact, 51% of Salesforce’s hiring in the first quarter was internal.
“Businesses are not going to be training their workers like they used to, saying ‘I’m going to take interns and these things,’” he said. “They need to have experience, and experience—not just with the tools—but working experience before they’re actually going to the job market.”
For his part, Benioff stressed in the FT humans are not helpless, arguing we can choose to guide and partner with AI.
On the other hand, assuming AI will simply replace humans means “we begin to write ourselves out of the future.”
“AI is not destiny,” he said. “We must choose wisely. We must design intentionally. And we must keep humans at the centre of this revolution.”
