Salesforce CEO: AI Agents Could Replace Hiring Gig Workers

For $2 a conversation, a new AI agent from Salesforce can answer questions from customers and schedule meetings — without a human being needed for oversight.

The AI agent technology, which Salesforce announced earlier this week at its annual Dreamforce event, has the potential to disrupt jobs currently held by human workers. Nearly three million people were employed as customer service representatives in 2022, with the majority (66%) being women, according to Data USA.

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Salesforce knows that its new technology carries the power to replace what could have been human hires. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said on Tuesday that the new AI agents allow companies to forgo hiring new employees or “gig workers” in more hectic periods of time, per Bloomberg.

“We want to get a billion agents with our customers in the next 12 months,” Benioff said.

^{Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images}

Adopting a hiring freeze, and then tasking AI with filling in the gaps, is a strategy being used by other companies like “buy now, pay later” payments firm Klarna.

One year ago, Klarna simply decided not to hire — not even replacements for people who left. Departing employees and an AI-induced hiring freeze have cut Klarna down from the 5,000-person workforce it was last year to the 3,800 people it had as of late August, without any layoffs.

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In late August, Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski told The Financial Times that the company wants to get its workforce down to 2,000 employees within the next few years with this approach.

“Not only can we do more with less, but we can do much more with less,” he told the Financial Times.

Klarna isn’t the only company using AI to automate tasks that humans once did. Within the next year, three in five large companies in the U.S. intend to use AI for everything from financial reporting to marketing campaigns, according to a June study from Duke University.

Goldman Sachs estimates that AI could replace or impact 300 million jobs by 2030, affecting writing, translation, and customer service gigs.

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