No new engineer hires this year as AI coding tools boost productivity, says Salesforce

Salesforce will not hire any more engineers this year after investment in AI coding tools provided a 30 percent productivity boost, its CEO claimed as he sought to charm investors.

Speaking as the CRM giant announced underwhelming Q4 results, Marc Benioff told analysts on an earnings call that Salesforce was seeing "tremendous efficiency" as a result of spending on AI agents and coding tools.

"We definitely have seen a lot of efficiency with engineering and with some of the new… high-performance coding tools."

He added: "It's pretty awesome. And we're not going to hire any new engineers this year. We're seeing 30 percent productivity increase on engineering, and we're going to really continue to ride that up."

For its Q4 ended January 31, 2025, the SaaS company posted revenue of $9.99 billion, up 8 percent year-on-year. Net income reached $1.7 billion, up from $1.4 billion.

However, revenue for the quarter missed guidance and was slightly under the $10.04 billion expected. Meanwhile, Salesforce's guidance for fiscal 2026 revenue was between $40.5 billion and $40.9 billion, compared to the average analysts' estimate of $41.35 billion, according to data compiled by LSEG.

Speaking to investors, Amy Weaver, president and chief financial officer, said the early stage adoption of Agentforce, the AI application designed to support to employees and customers, had shaped the forecast.

"On Agentforce, we are incredibly excited about the customer momentum we are seeing. However, the adoption cycle is still early as we focus on deployment with our customers. As a result, we are assuming a modest contribution to revenue in fiscal '26. We expect the momentum to build throughout the year, driving a more meaningful contribution in fiscal '27," she said.

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Currency exchange rates and changes in the company's professional services strategy also affected the guidance, she said.

Earlier this year, Gartner said that businesses were continuing to invest in AI, despite "moonshot" projects seeing a high failure rate.

"The GenAI work that was done in 2024 — the transformational stuff, the moonshot projects — those are pretty much going to be over for 2025. They were maybe a little under-invested in and there were pretty high failure rates," John-David Lovelock, distinguished VP analyst at Gartner, told The Register. ®