As AI slashes white-collar jobs, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff says there’s one department still hiring: sales

Legions of students pursued engineering in college in hopes of hitting the hiring market as a hot commodity. But now, their prospects are falling flat among some major employers. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff recently revealed that the $145 billion cloud-based platform is keeping its engineering headcount unchanged as AI generates bounds of productivity. And the recruitment freeze extends to many layers across the tech giant—except for sales.

“We’re not hiring more engineers, we’re not hiring more GA [general and administrative roles], we’re mostly expanding only in one area,” Benioff recently said during a quarterly earnings call this Wednesday, adding that the company is “mostly growing in Miguel’s area: in sales.”

Benioff noted that the number of engineers at Salesforce has stagnated for around two years, holding steady at around 15,000 staffers; last year, the CEO even announced the company would not hire any more engineers in 2025 due to AI gains. And yet Salesforce’s headcount has still ticked up thanks to one key area of growth: sales. 

Talent that has the savvy to sell the company’s products—ranging from customer clouds and AI agents to Slack—is at the forefront of the business’ hiring agenda. The CEO noted that the team of Miguel Milano, chief revenue officer of Salesforce, has been expanding despite reduced hiring in other departments. 

“I think we all realize the one thing that we are doing here with you—selling and communicating—that agents are not exactly doing that,” Benioff said. “They can qualify, they can provide service, but in sales we still scale because there are so many different parts of the market that we have to get to.”

Hiring has been put on pause, but the engineering hiring freeze may be thawing

Salesforce’s choice to hold back on engineer hiring reflects growing anxiety in the profession: that AI and reduced hiring are stifling job opportunities. 

“For the last couple years we have not been loading up a lot more engineers,” Benioff said. “The reason it’s been mostly flat is because we’ve been using AI to create more efficiencies for our engineers. And especially this year—now with these new coding agents—we’ve seen even more dramatic capabilities.”

The cloud giant isn’t the only business that’s tightening this department’s headcount. Last year Amazon’s 14,000-plus layoffs touched nearly every part of the business, yet engineers were hit the hardest with job cuts, as nearly 40% of the 4,700 layoffs across New York, California, and New Jersey were engineering roles. And Microsoft’s software engineers were the largest single job category to receive layoff notices in May last year. As of early 2025, the number of job postings for software engineers—the most common tech job title—decreased by 49% since early 2020 levels, according to a LinkedIn analysis. 

However, things may be turning around, as listings for software engineer jobs on Indeed were up 11% year over year, according to 2026 analysis from Citadel Securities. While some niches of roles like AI and cybersecurity engineers are still hot on the market, companies like Salesforce are looking for talent with the human touch to close deals. 

While some tech workers lose their jobs to AI, sales remains a silver lining

Engineering has been rattled by hiring freezes and AI, all while offering sky-high earning potential if talent are able to get a gig and hold it down. 

The latest tech revolution is proving to be a gold mine for some workers like AI engineers, as others are confronted with automation woes; one software engineer told Fortune he was unable to snag another opportunity after being laid off in the AI era, and was forced to live in a trailer to make ends meet. 

And many companies are already starting to get in on the AI boom, sending a shockwave of anxiety among the sector. Last year Goldman Sachs revealed that it had hired Devin: an AI-powered autonomous software engineer. The Wall Street firm hoped the tool would increase employee productivity—and Goldman’s chief information officer Marco Argenti said the company could hire hundreds or even thousands more to work alongside its 12,000 human software engineers.

Even as companies pull back elsewhere, many are continuing to invest in the people pushing products in the AI boom—making sales a resilient career choice. Sales representatives selling products and services to clients through face-to-face interactions was one of the top 10 fastest-growing jobs in the U.S. during 2025, according to LinkedIn. 

It was ranked above nearly all engineering roles that also made the cut—except for AI engineers, which made it to number one. 

And Benioff picked up on their value years ago; in 2024, the Salesforce CEO announced that the company planned to hire 2,000 new sales employees to take on the increased demand of its AI tools. Additionally, about 66% of SaaS (software as a service) firms said they would ramp up their sales hiring in 2025.

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