Job openings for Salesforce (CRM) positions are becoming difficult to find in the age of artificial intelligence, unless you can close sales.
The idea: Salesforce co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff made one thing very clear on his earnings call Wednesday: Hiring decisions are more focused than ever within a company long known for bringing on aggressive people.
“Over the last few years, we haven’t hired many more engineers under Srini (Tallapragada, Salesforce chief engineer),” Benioff said. He noted that hiring at Tallapragada’s team of 15,000 engineers has remained largely unchanged for two years as the company has leaned toward the efficiency of AI and coding agents.
“We are expanding primarily in one area,” Benioff added. “You can see the headcount has grown, but it’s growing primarily in (chief revenue officer Miguel Milano’s) sales side, because I think we all realize that the only thing we’re doing here with…selling and communicating is that agents aren’t doing exactly that. They can qualify well. They can service. But in sales, we’re still scaling because there are so many different parts of the market that we have to reach. So that’s going to be a critical part of expanding our company, but at the same time, expanding our margins.”
Salesforce reportedly cut approximately 4,000 positions in its customer support division last September as part of its push toward agent AI.
A tough earnings day for CRM: Salesforce posted adjusted earnings of $3.88 per share versus Wall Street expectations of $3.12, helped by a staggering $27 billion in share buybacks, which reduced the share count by a whopping 10%. Revenue reached $11.13 billion, up 13% year over year and ahead of the consensus of $11.05 billion.
The midpoint of Salesforce’s full-year revenue guidance was $46.05 billion, just a hair shy of the $46.12 billion analysts were estimating, and that slight miss is why the stock didn’t rise higher in today’s session. (Currently it has barely risen and at one point fell more than 3%). Investors aren’t confident in how or when AI at Salesforce will translate into big sales and profits.
For the current quarter, Benioff is calling for between $11.27 billion and $11.35 billion in revenue versus Street expectations of $11.36 billion (again, just a tick), and in this market, where software stocks are already under pressure, even a slight miss in guidance is enough to give the bears something to work with.
The final result: Did Benioff just indicate on his earnings call that he’s open to reducing engineering ranks this year, given how quickly AI is driving productivity? It’s unclear, but it wouldn’t be a surprise given the pace of AI tool development and layoffs elsewhere in Big Tech.