London
Today’s chief executives are the last generation to manage all-human workforces as companies increasingly adopt artificial intelligence, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said Thursday.
“From this point forward… we will be managing not only human workers but also digital workers,” he said on a panel at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Benioff provided a recent example from his own business.
He said Salesforce’s software had been used to help run the annual conference in Davos for more than a decade. But this year, for the first time, the San Francisco-based tech giant incorporated an “AI agent” into its app for Davos attendees to help them decide which panels to attend.
Echoing comments he made at last year’s meeting, about AI augmenting but not replacing human workers, Benioff also said Thursday that AI and humans can work together “to create a higher level of success.”
“AI is kind of becoming our partner to help us to run our lives, run our businesses, to help us to deliver a new level of productivity,” he added, suggesting that those productivity gains could be achieved without a larger “human workforce.”
Worries have grown in recent years over AI’s potential to replace human workers. The release of ChatGPT, OpenAI’s chatbot powered by generative AI, in late 2022 demonstrated the power of the technology to produce detailed, human-like responses to users’ prompts for example, in the form of essays and articles in a matter of seconds.
Speaking alongside Benioff, Dario Amodei, the CEO and co-founder of AI juggernaut Anthropic, said: “My guess is that by 2026 or 2027 we will have AI systems that are broadly better than almost all humans at almost all things.”
Earlier this month, a World Economic Forum survey showed that 41% of employers globally intend to downsize their workforce by 2030 as AI automates certain tasks. According to the poll, published in the Future of Jobs Report, 77% are also planning to reskill and upskill their existing workers between 2025-2030 so they work better alongside AI.
Striking an optimistic note, the report said the primary impact of technologies such as generative AI on jobs might lie in their potential for “augmenting” human skills through “human-machine collaboration,” rather than in outright replacement, “particularly given the continued importance of human-centered skills.”
On Wednesday, Benioff also commented on the $500 billion AI infrastructure project announced in the United States this week, saying it signaled only the start of “trillions” more in investment.
“You’re just seeing the very beginning of what will be one of the biggest investment levels in the history of the world,” he told ’s Richard Quest in Davos. “Because this is an opportunity for us to completely transform how we do everything.”
