• AI is radically reshaping business at Salesforce.
• That doesn't mean that CEO Marc Benioff sees AI as a future mass killer of white-collar jobs.
• Instead, Benioff forsees "a radical augmentation of the workforce."

Marc Benioff said that while artificial intelligence is drastically reshaping Salesforce, it doesn't mean that it will wipe out white-collar workers.

"That isn't how I see AI," Benioff, Salesforce's CEO, told Atlantic CEO Nicholas Thompson during a recent onstage interview at the 2025 AI for Good Global Summit. "Maybe they have AI, I don't have. But in the AI I have, it's not going to be some huge mass layoff of white-collar workers, it is a radical augmentation of the workforce."

Benioff's broader view of AI contrasts with how other in tech view the next decade. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who was not mentioned directly during Benioff's appearance, has said AI may eliminate half of entry-level, white-collar jobs within the next five years.

People need to get past this type of general "fear," Benioff said.

"When I'm talking to our customers, I'm not hearing them say, "Oh, now I'm laying off these people because this A,B,C technology increase because of AI.' So, I think we need to somehow shed the fear of what that all means."

For his own company, Benioff says he's paused Salesforce's hiring of engineers, lawyers, and customer service agents for the year so the company can "let AI productivity really take hold."

"Right now, for engineering organization, because of the incredible productivity opportunity, for AI in engineering this year, let's take some time to actually incorporate that in so we're not focused on hiring another thousand, 2,000, 3,000 engineers," he said.

At the same time, Benioff said Salesforce is ramping up sales-related hires due to customer demand to deploy AI. That's likely because, in his view, we're on the edge of "a radical explosion in small and medium businesses."

"You're just going to see a lot more SMBs and a lot more general business and mid-market business, because their capabilities are radically amplified by the AI," he said.

• A think tank boss believes AI will replace most jobs by 2045, leaving billions without work.
• Sex work, coaching, and politics may survive, but not at the scale society needs, Adam Dorr said.
• He said the future could bring mass inequality or "super-abundance," depending on our response now.

By 2045, robots and artificial intelligence could render most human jobs obsolete — and there's little time to prepare for the fallout, according to Adam Dorr, director of research at the RethinkX think tank.

In a Wednesday interview with The Guardian, Dorr warned that machines are advancing so rapidly that within a generation, they'll be able to perform virtually every job humans do, at a lower cost and with equal or superior quality.

Drawing from historical patterns of disruption, he compared today's workforce to horses in the age of cars, or traditional cameras in the age of digital photography.

"We're the horses, we're the film cameras," he said.

Dorr and his research team have documented more than 1,500 major technological transformations. In most cases, he said, once a technology gains even a few percentage points of market share, it quickly dominates — typically within 15 to 20 years.

"Machines that can think are here, and their capabilities are expanding day by day with no end in sight," he said. "We don't have that long to get ready for this."

Still, he said, not every job is destined for extinction. Dorr believes a narrow set of roles may survive the AI takeover, especially those grounded in human connection, trust, and ethical complexity.

He pointed to sex workers, sports coaches, politicians, and ethicists as examples of jobs that could remain relevant.

"There will remain a niche for human labor in some domains," he said. "The problem is that there are nowhere near enough of those occupations to employ 4 billion people."

Dorr argued that the looming upheaval could lead either to mass inequality or to what he called "super-abundance" — a society where human needs are met without traditional labor. But achieving the latter, he said, will require bold experiments in how we define work, value, and ownership.

"This could be one of the most amazing things to ever happen to humanity," he said — but only if we're ready.

The AI takeover debate is heating up

Several top AI researchers and tech leaders have shared Dorr's concerns, though views on which jobs will endure vary.

Geoffrey Hinton, often called the "Godfather of AI," warned that "mundane intellectual labor" is most at risk. On the Diary of a CEO podcast in June, he said he'd be "terrified" to work in a call center or as a paralegal.

Hinton believes hands-on roles like plumbing are safer, at least for now, saying it will be a long time before AI is "as good at physical manipulation" as people.

In May, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told Axios that he believes that half of all entry-level white-collar jobs, including roles in tech, finance, law, and consulting, could disappear within five years.

But Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Meta's Yann LeCun have pushed back, saying AI will transform jobs, not eliminate them entirely.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also said AI will displace many roles, but believes new ones will emerge, even if they look "sillier and sillier" over time. "We have always been really good at figuring out new things to do," he said.

MIT economist David Autor took a darker view: AI may not wipe out jobs, but it could make people's skills worthless, ushering in a "Mad Max" economy where many fight over a shrinking pool of valuable jobs.