Silicon Valley crisis: Companies like Salesforce and Meta no longer hire human engineers.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has sparked a heated debate in Silicon Valley after publicly announcing that the company has decided to slow down the hiring of new software engineers.

During a speech at the World Economic Forum, the executive declared: “We are the last generation that only manages people,” a statement that not only marks a break with the traditional model of business leadership, but also anticipates a new paradigm in which leaders will have to coexist with digital agents as an integral part of their teams.

AI and algorithms will need to be coordinated instead of humans
Rather than supervising only human employees, the managers of the future will have to learn to coordinate algorithms, language models, and autonomous systems that are already taking on key roles within organizations. This statement makes even more sense considering Salesforce’s aggressive push to establish itself as a benchmark in artificial intelligence applied to business management. The firm has invested heavily in its suite of AI-powered tools, including the “Agentforce” platform, designed to automate processes such as customer support, audience segmentation, and advertising content generation.

According to the company’s own data, nearly half of the Fortune 100 companies already use its AI and Data Cloud solutions, which has contributed to Salesforce closing the first quarter of 2025 with revenues exceeding $10 billion, an 8% year-over-year increase.

But Salesforce is not alone in this transformation. At Google, more than 25% of new code is already generated by artificial intelligence, as confirmed by its CEO, Sundar Pichai. Meta, for its part, has begun integrating autonomous conversational agents into its social platforms, and Amazon uses predictive models to fine-tune its logistics and sales decisions.