Salesforce CEO: AI Decides Who Gets Hired Now

Salesforce is still hiring in just one department, and it is not the one most graduates bet their degrees on.

“We’re not hiring more engineers, we’re not hiring more GA, we’re mostly expanding only in one area,” CEO Marc Benioff said on the company’s quarterly earnings call on 27 May. The company, he added, is “mostly growing in sales”.

Engineering headcount has sat flat at around 15,000 for roughly two years, with AI efficiency gains the stated reason.

The freeze stretches across general and administrative functions too, leaving the sales organisation as the lone growth engine at one of the world’s largest software companies.

Agents can qualify, but they cannot close

Marc's logic is that selling is the one job AI agents have not cracked. “They can qualify, they can provide service, but in sales we still scale because there are so many different parts of the market that we have to get to,” he said on the call.

The beneficiary is Miguel Milano, President and Chief Revenue Officer of Salesforce, whose organisation keeps expanding while every other function holds flat.

Miguel has said the distribution organisation is growing by more than 20% this year, in an interview with diginomica.

The bet is not new. Marc announced plans to hire 2,000 sales staff in 2024 to meet demand for the company’s AI products, and the earnings call confirms the strategy has only hardened since.

The coding agents came for the job boards

The engineering freeze reflects a profession under pressure. “For the last couple years we have not been loading up a lot more engineers,” Benioff said. “And especially this year, now with these new coding agents, we’ve seen even more dramatic capabilities.”

The data backs the anxiety. Postings for software engineers, the most common tech job title, fell 49% from early 2020 levels as of early 2025, according to Indeed Hiring Lab analysis cited by Fortune.

Wall Street is automating the same work. Goldman Sachs has deployed Devin, an autonomous AI software engineer built by startup Cognition, alongside its 12,000 human developers.

“Initially, we will have hundreds of Devins and that might go into the thousands, depending on the use cases,” Marco Argenti, Chief Information Officer at Goldman Sachs, told CNBC.

There are early signs of a thaw. Software engineering listings on Indeed rose 11% year on year, according to a 2026 analysis from Citadel Securities, with AI and cybersecurity specialists still in demand.

The human touch becomes a growth strategy

For HR leaders, the Salesforce position inverts a decade of workforce planning. The technical roles once treated as scarce are now capped, while relationship roles agents cannot replicate are the growth investment.

The labour market agrees. Face-to-face sales representatives ranked among the 10 fastest-growing jobs in the US during 2025, according to LinkedIn, placing above nearly every engineering role on the list.

Only one category beat them: AI engineers, which took the top spot.

The investment pattern runs across the industry. About 66% of software-as-a-service firms said they would increase sales hiring in 2025, Fortune reports.

The pattern mirrors how banks are reshaping hiring around AI, with capability spend flowing to the roles machines strengthen rather than the roles they replace.

The message for talent leaders is blunt. The safest seats in an AI workforce are the ones doing what Marc says agents still cannot: selling, communicating and closing.