Salesforce says AI has reduced hiring of engineers and customer service workers

[NEW YORK] Salesforce said the use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools internally has allowed it to hire fewer workers, another example of a company changing its hiring plans due to the emerging technology.

“We have reduced some of our hiring needs,” chief financial and operations officer Robin Washington said on Wednesday (May 28) on a call with analysts, citing the implementation of AI tools. For example, she said that 500 customer service workers would be redeployed to different roles within the company this year, saving US$50 million.

Tech companies are relying on AI to help with everything from customer service to software engineering. Job cuts at Microsoft earlier this month fell hardest on software engineers. Leaders of Microsoft and Alphabet said that AI is producing about 30 per cent of new code on some projects.

For years, social networks have been offloading content moderation jobs to AI; this year Meta Platforms will be relying on a class of AI-powered engineers to carry out basic bug fixes and product improvements at Meta, chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg has said.

In an interview, Washington said that Salesforce is hiring fewer engineers due to productivity gains from AI. “We view these as assistants, but they are going to allow us to have to hire less and hopefully make our existing folks more productive.” Salesforce reported a workforce of about 76,500 employees as at Jan 31.

At the same time as it’s slowing hiring in some roles, Salesforce is increasing the ranks of sales workers. The company now has 13,000 salespeople, a sum that is expected to expand 22 per cent this year from a year earlier, chief revenue officer Miguel Milano said.

Earlier this year, Salesforce planned to cut over 1,000 employees as it hired for AI-focused roles, particularly in sales. BLOOMBERG