AI leaders have said that artificial intelligence could eliminate large numbers of white-collar jobs — and those warnings have intensified after Block laid off 40% of its employees amid a new AI push.
Salesforce’s CEO, Marc Benioff, isn’t so sure.
In a Wednesday interview with CNBC, he suggested that Block’s move reflects company-specific challenges rather than a broader labor-market shift.
“Listen, obviously, that company has its own unique issues. We all know that, so let’s put that aside,” Benioff said. “These pronouncements of these mass white collar layoffs: I just do not see it.”
His remarks contrast with increasingly stark predictions from some AI industry leaders and investors.
In an interview released Wednesday, OpenAI investor Vinod Khosla said he believes AI could replace 80% of human work in the 2030s. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has said AI could soon eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar roles.
Benioff, however, argued that AI can boost productivity without triggering sweeping layoffs.
Salesforce had some AI-driven layoffs, too
Salesforce itself has reduced its head count as it rolls out more AI tools.
In September, Benioff said the company cut roughly 4,000 roles, including in customer support, citing efficiency gains from AI tools.
“I’ve reduced it from 9,000 heads to about 5,000 because I need less heads,” Benioff said on an episode of “The Logan Bartlett Show.”
The company conducted another round of layoffs in February, affecting fewer than 1,000 employees, and recently reshuffled its executive team.
Still, employees remain confident in Salesforce’s AI approach.
In a November internal employee survey, around 80% of respondents said Salesforce’s AI tools help them boost productivity, Business Insider previously reported.
“Yes, I did trim some areas and move more capacity into sales,” Benioff said during his Wednesday spot on CNBC. “I asked Ernst and Young, who is our accountant, ‘What am I doing wrong?’ They’re like, ‘You’re not doing wrong. You’re actually ahead of everybody else.'”
Defense against a ‘SaaSpocalypse’
Salesforce’s shares are down 20% this year amid broader concerns that increasingly capable AI agents could disrupt traditional software-as-a-service companies.
Investors have questioned whether advanced AI systems — including tools like Claude Code that can write and debug code, edit files, and build websites — could replace some functions handled by enterprise software products.
Those questions have led to investor sell-offs for traditional SaaS companies, a social phenomenon Wall Street has called the “SaaSpocalypse.”
Benioff doesn’t agree.
“We are delivering a quarter at 12% growth at scale, close to $50 billion in revenue,” he said. “To say there’s some kind of a SaaSpocalypse going on, well, we don’t see it in our pipelines, and we don’t see it in our numbers.”
Salesforce has rolled out its own AI-enabled products, such as Agentforce.
“There is definitely people who have narratives, who come out of a lot of movies,” he said. “But let’s come down to what reality is right now, and these numbers are the reality.”
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