Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff revealed on the All-In Podcast that the company expects to spend around $300 million on Anthropic tokens this year. He said the tokens will be used primarily for coding tasks, describing AI coding agents and Anthropic as “awesome” in the same breath. Benioff added that this investment would significantly reduce development costs across Salesforce.
Marc Benioff said the company will not hire additional software engineers next year. "We're not adding any more software engineers next year because we have increased the productivity this year with Agentforce and with other AI technology that we're using for engineering teams by more than 30%," Benioff said at the time. He added that engineering teams had achieved higher velocity due to AI integration.
It looks like Salesforce is shifting focus from expanding engineering teams to investing in AI-powered coding tools. The company announced in 2024 that it would stop hiring software engineers in 2025, yet it still expects significant spending on Anthropic tokens. CEO Marc Benioff credits over 30% productivity gains to AI tools like Agentforce, with projected spending potentially reaching $300 million in 2026.
However he also clarified that AI is reshaping, not replacing engineers, but working alongside them, with around 15,000 engineers now using tools like Anthropic models, OpenAI Codex and Cursor to improve productivity. He added that engineers still play a central role, supervising AI agents as the technology continues to evolve. He added that engineers still play a central role, supervising AI agents as the technology continues to evolve.
AI is acting as a co-worker, not a replacement for engineers
Around 15,000 engineers use AI tools to assist coding tasks
Engineers supervise AI agents, ensuring human oversight remains key
Salesforce is expanding AI use across Slack and Agentforce platforms
The company is optimizing AI workloads using different model types
It has invested over $300M in Anthropic and holds an equity stake
Agentforce has reached $800M in annual recurring revenue
Slack now includes Claude-powered AI features
Benioff describes the shift as a “digital labour revolution,” with AI contributing up to half of workloads. Nonetheless, the company is still expanding in other departments, as Salesforce intends to hire between 1,000 and 2,000 additional sales representatives to market its AI offerings and clarify their business benefits to clients.