At the beginning of the year, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff indicated that the company is seriously debating hiring new software engineers due to the "incredible productivity gains" from agentic AIs.
As it happens, the company is set to lay off up to 1,000 employees from its workforce (via Bloomberg). Oddly, Salesforce is currently recruiting new employees in its market division to sell its AI-powered products and services.
Salesforce has remained quiet about the reported job cuts, making it difficult to determine which departments within the organization will be affected. However, sources with close affiliations with the company disclosed that affected employees should be able to apply for other positions within the company, potentially including the AI sales positions.
For context, Salesforce had up to 73,000 employees as of January 2024, meaning up to 1.36% of the company's workforce will be affected by the job cuts.
While speaking at an event hosted by Barclays Plc in December 2024, CEO Brian Millham highlighted the company's profit-driven focus:
“Just because we have a hit new product doesn’t mean that we ignore the commitments we’ve made internally and externally as we think about scaling this business. We’re looking across the entire company to say, ‘Where can we get more efficiencies? How can we continue to get fuel for the work that we’re doing to go invest in scale going forward?”
Salesforce isn't the only company that has been affected by job cuts. In January, Microsoft announced two rounds of layoffs. First, the company announced performance-based job cuts across departments, including security, slated to impact "less than 1%" of the workforce. Later, the Redmond giant was hit by another round of layoffs, impacting employees across security, experiences, sales, devices, and gaming departments.
More recently, the company announced a hiring freeze, impacting its consulting business in the U.S. as part of its broader plans to cut costs.
Meta's workforce is on the chopping board, too. The Facebook maker is expected to make performance-based cuts, slated to impact approximately 5%. According to CEO Mark Zuckerberg:
“We typically manage out people who aren’t meeting expectations over the course of a year, but now we’re going to do more extensive performance-based cuts during this cycle."
Elsewhere, Zuckerberg painted a picture of a potential future at Meta where mid-level AI engineers might claim coding jobs from software engineers.
