Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has made wide-ranging predictions about how Agentforce – and agentic AI generally – is going to change the face of Salesforce, the workplace, and the world.
Here, we examine five of those claims.
1. A Digital Labor ‘Revolution’
Ahead of the launch of Agentforce 2.0 last year, Marc Benioff said that the update “takes our revolutionary Salesforce digital labor platform to another level”, adding that the ramped AI suite “cements our position as the leader in digital labor solutions, allowing any company to build a limitless workforce that can truly transform their business”.
The Salesforce CEO, along with hedge fund manager Ray Dalio, discussed several topics in an interview with CNBC in March, including the Trump administration, whether the US has dominance in the tech sector, China, and what AI and robotics mean for the future.
Marc said: “We’re moving into the digital labor revolution, it’s this $3-12T opportunity, it involves agents, and digital agents in an agentic age. But it also beholds a robotic age. In the robotic age, who is going to make the robots? I think that it’s very impressive what the Chinese have been able to do with this robotic age. So, the robots, the agents, AI, this is all part and parcel of the future.”
Salesforce has made the claim that workplaces have more work to do than resources available, which causes worse customer interactions and lengthy backlogs.
And “digital labor” was a big topic at this year’s TrailblazerDX, with EVP of Product & Industries Marketing at Salesforce, Patrick Stokes, delivering a keynote speech focusing heavily on the idea of a “digital labor revolution” – including, of course, Agentforce.
At the unveiling of Agentforce 2.0, Marc Benioff explained precisely what he meant by “digital labor” in a bit more detail.
He said: “When we’re talking about agents, we’re talking about digital labor. When I took the Waymo here this morning, I got in the car and I hit the button ‘start ride’, it’s digital labor. The robot is bringing me here. It’s all happening digitally. There was nobody in the front seat.
“The idea then [is that] robots are physical manifestations of agents – these agentic platforms are the fundamental enabling technology for the robotic layer.”
It appears that the current wave of agentic AI is a precursor to the even greater potential of “digital labor” – that being robotics.
2. Economic Growth: Uptick in Global GDP
Marc Benioff has said that agentic AI is a “new labor model, new productivity model, and a new economic model”.
The dawn of a digital labor force working alongside humans has profound implications, Salesforce says, with operations being streamlined, productivity being enhanced, costs reduced, and “new levels of innovation and scalability” being unlocked.
It means that, for the first time, workforces can “exceed the bounds of human capability” thanks to autonomous agents working 24/7 to expand productivity, the cloud giant says.
According to Salesforce, labor markets are “the tightest they’ve been in two decades”, meaning new models are “sorely needed”.
The cloud giant also claims that aging populations, declining birth rates, and a change in “worker expectations” mean that an estimated 85M jobs could go unfulfilled by 2030.
In any case, with digital labor, companies can increase output and productivity without increasing headcount, and a transition away from human-dependent workflows could create an opportunity for “24/7 productivity”, meaning businesses can serve global markets without local teams or infrastructure.
This, Marc Benioff says, could mean a “fairly significant” uptick in global GDP.
3. Role of CEO Changing: Not Just Overseeing Humans
Marc Benioff has said that he will be the last Salesforce CEO who only manages humans.
He has echoed these sentiments elsewhere as well, saying at the World Economic Forum in Davos earlier this year: “From this point forward…we will be managing not only human workers but also digital workers.”
In a conversation with Axios, Marc said: “We are really moving into a world now of managing humans and agents together… Because I’m using Agentforce, I just have that much more productivity.”
This will have some implications for the role of the CEO, and these changes can even be seen within Salesforce.
In December last year, Marc said that his company saw such a productivity boost from AI that he would be hiring no additional software engineers but would be likely adding another 1,000 to 2,000 salespeople.
If such a trend were to continue, it might mean CEOs in the tech sector generally would oversee far fewer technical people, with a stronger emphasis on roles that – for now – cannot be scaled through the use of AI.
4. Humans and Agents Working ‘Hand-in-Hand’
The flipside of the above section about the role of the CEO changing is, of course, the role of regular workers changing – namely, increasingly having to work alongside agents.
Skeptics of how AI will affect human civilization will say that this technology has the potential to replace large swathes of the population’s jobs, meaning mass unemployment and all the social upheaval that comes along with it.
Salesforce has been saying that their vision is for humans to work side-by-side with AI.
Salesforce Chief People Officer Nathalie Scardino said in February: “We’re in the biggest workforce transformation of our lifetime as we unlock the power of agents and humans working together.
“Every organization will be called to redesign their people strategies, redeploy talent to support a future workforce with agents, and reskill employees — and every employee will need to lean in on human, business, and agent skills to drive success for themselves and for their customers.”
In his interview with CNBC in Singapore earlier this year, Marc was asked what the “robotic age” means for the workforce.
He said that it will mean humans will be working “hand-in-hand” with robots, adding: “I’ve told my employees, my customers, I’ll be the last CO of Salesforce who only managed humans.”
5. The Upper Limits of LLMs?
Speaking on The Wall Street Journal’s ‘Future of Everything’ podcast in November, Marc said that he thinks “we’re hitting the upper limits of the LLMs right now”.
He added: “I think we all got drunk on the ChatGPT Kool-Aid… we’ve got to keep these things in perspective. It’s a tool. And I hope that we’re using it to improve humanity and make things better.”
Marc Benioff made a “hard pivot” in Salesforce’s approach to AI recently, moving away from Einstein Copilot to fully embrace AI agents.
On the podcast, Marc argued that LLMs have been overhyped and should not be seen as the centerpiece of AI advancement.
He has also been critical of the widespread reliance on tools like ChatGPT, claiming it has created “inflated expectations” of what artificial intelligence can realistically achieve.
Marc proposes taking an agent-based approach to AI development going forward, saying: “Let’s replace bureaucracy with an agentic layer that serves people, not politics. We have incredible tools to augment our productivity, to augment our employees, to prove our margins, to prove our revenues, to make our companies fundamentally better, to have higher fidelity relationships with our customers.”
Final Thoughts
Marc Benioff has overseen the rise of one of the most successful tech companies in recent history, so it’s fair to say his opinion is worth heeding on these matters.
On the other hand, the CEO plainly has an interest in selling the public a vision of the future where his own company’s product – Agentforce – plays a crucial role in driving productivity and helping humans work more effectively.
In any case, it seems clear that AI will continue to become more advanced, and businesses around the world will likely want to utilize any efficiency-boosted (or cost-cutting) measure they can in order to get the edge on their competition, so much of what Marc has to say about a “digital labor” revolution may well come to pass.
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