Marc Benioff says AI can't replace engineers, but just backed a startup that automates the work of rolling out AI

June does not describe replacing workers as its goal. June’s Rapoport has said AI has actually increased demand for professional services, and frames June as a tool for people doing that kind of work. Anxious software engineers may have nothing to worry about, but the product’s appeal is the ability to run the same rollout with fewer human hands required in the required cleanup effort to get to that point.

The proof is in the pudding

In a 2026 Forward Future podcast interview, Benioff told host Matthew Berman that AI is not ready to replace software engineers, adding that Salesforce software engineers, 15,000 strong, are “hugely augmented” by AI models.

“But still, those engineers are needed,” Benioff said. “The model still cannot operate autonomously.”

Salesforce, which has built its $162 billion market cap via cloud-based enterprise software for customer relationship management, is also increasingly using AI in its own company to achieve robust results. While the company’s stock price has slid 25.4% year-to-date, shares have rebounded by over 15% in the past month, thanks in large part to the company’s Agentforce platform. Salesforce announced its Q1 2027 earnings back in May, reporting $11.13 billion in revenue, up 13% year over year, and raised its full-year outlook to as much as $46.2 billion.

In an August 2025 interview on “The Logan Bartlett Show”, Benioff acknowledged that AI agents in Salesforce’s customer support channels were already supplanting humans, which has led to more customer sales.

“It’s been eight of the most exciting months of my career,” Benioff said. “I was able to rebalance my headcount on my support. “I’ve reduced it from 9,000 heads to about 5,000 because I need less heads.”

Canary, meet coalmine

Now with Benioff’s financial backing of June AI, which brings more agentic AI to the corporate technology table, tech experts say software jobs are in peril. Yet, not in tidal wave-type cuts that have been posited.

“I don’t see a contradiction, but the software business can do extremely well while some of the jobs around that software might disappear,” Ahmed Ameen, chief operating officer of workplace technology firm ET Group, told Moneywise. “For example, if AI can make a platform easier to employ, configure and support, then customers will likely get more value from the product while needing fewer people to make it all work.”

Other workplace technology analysts say the bigger issue is companies like Salesforce

describing AI agents as “digital labor” and shifting toward charging customers for work performed by AI rather than simply selling software seats.

“The shift is huge,” Matthew Baden, managing technical director at the Search Experience, a tech specialist recruitment firm, told Moneywise. “It suggests the unit of value is moving away from how many people are using the software and toward how much work actually gets done.”

For workers, that means the economic value of simply providing capacity is likely to decline.

“If a company can use AI to perform more of the execution, the value of the human increasingly sits in the judgment calls that AI can’t make for you; deciding what to build, not just building it,” Baden said.

Right now, the technology sector is mostly seeing AI-skilled technology workers, making individual software engineers faster and more leveraged.

“But augmentation and substitution aren’t mutually exclusive,” Baden said. “If one engineer using AI can produce what previously required several people, the engineer is being augmented while some of the additional headcount is being substituted.”

For companies like Salesforce, the software’s value proposition gets stronger “because the customer can run the same rollout with fewer people, and not just buy the software,” Baden added.