The American company Salesforce, owner of the corporate messenger Slack, will not hire new programmers in 2025, as AI tools for writing code already contribute to increasing productivity.
According to The Register, after implementing AI-powered coding tools, productivity in this area within the company increased by 30%.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said the company's investments in AI tools for writing software code were "tremendous," commenting on the company's Q4 fiscal 2024 report, which did not have the best results.
"We definitely have seen a lot of efficiency with engineering and with some of the new… high-performance coding tools. It's pretty awesome. And we're not going to hire any new engineers this year. We're seeing 30 percent productivity increase on engineering, and we're going to really continue to ride that up," Benioff said.
Analysts suggest that such statements reflect the desire of Salesforce management to show investors confidence in the implementation of AI tools within the company and to demonstrate the demand for them from customers.
As for Salesforce's financial results, according to the results of the 4th quarter, which ended on January 31, 2025, the company earned $9.99 billion, which is 8% more than in the same period a year earlier. Net income increased from $1.4 billion to $1.7 billion. The company's quarterly revenue was slightly lower than the level predicted by analysts — $10.04 billion. Total revenue for the fiscal year increased by 9%, to $37.9 billion.
Salesforce is targeting revenue in the range of $40.5-40.9 billion in fiscal year 2026, while experts expect this figure to be at $41.35 billion.
According to Salesforce President and CFO Amy Weaver, in giving a modest forecast, the company takes into account the fact that the process of implementing a promising tool Agentforce is in one of the early stages. Agentforce is a platform that allows users to create AI-based agents to automate tasks, optimize workflows and save time.
"Regarding Agentforce, we are incredibly excited about the customer response. However, the internal adoption cycle is still early as we focus on delivering this tool to customers. We anticipate a modest contribution of Agentforce to revenue in fiscal 2026. We expect interest in the product to grow, leading to a more significant contribution in fiscal 2027," Weaver said.
As we previously reported, at the World Economic Forum, which took place from January 20 to 24, 2025, AI industry leaders discussed the prospects of new technologies and the risks they pose. Some executives spoke about potential threats to humanity, while others considered these fears excessive and "hypocritical."
“The tensions that arose between Mustafa Suleiman (Microsoft’s top AI manager) and Sam Altman of OpenAI at Davos last year were just the beginning. Microsoft is now accelerating its own AI development. This pattern mirrors Microsoft’s past relationships with its “partners.” This could signal the beginning of the end of the relationship, making it critical for OpenAI to quickly expand to other platforms,” Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said at the time.