"Do not sacrifice your entry-level jobs": Salesforce might be all in on AI, but it isn't giving up on junior workers yet – despite Marc Benioff's job replacement claims

Salesforce is still committed to hiring junior team members even as AI automates roles, according to UK&I chief executive Zahra Bahrololoumi.

Speaking to assembled press at Dreamforce 2025, Bahrololoumi addressed what she described as a universal fear and “orthodoxy” that AI will replace entry-level jobs.

Bahrololoumi stressed that this is not a Salesforce strategy in the UK or elsewhere and urged companies looking to eliminate junior roles with the technology to reconsider.

“Our message here is: do not sacrifice your entry-level jobs because you do need people that can work through that function, that process that can work alongside the AI to be able to manage and lead that composition of digital and human capital.”

Paul O’Sullivan, UKI CTO at Salesforce, said the firm is working closely with UK academic institutions such as Brunel University to plug skills gaps, noting that Salesforce is part of a UK government industry partnership that aims to train 7.5 million workers in AI skills by 2030.

“If companies eliminate entry-level hiring, they will not have the right skill profile to be able to orchestrate and manage the duality, or maybe the multimodality, that will be our future,” Bahrololoumi added.

Despite its efforts to expand AI skills and targeted hiring in the UK, Salesforce is elsewhere engaged in widespread job cuts driven by AI tools.

CEO Marc Benioff has repeatedly emphasized that Agentforce and greater AI adoption would enable the firm to cut staff spending and reduce hiring across a range of areas, including customer support and even software engineering.

In September, he revealed that Salesforce has already reduced customer support roles by around 50% as a result of its own internal success with agentic AI tools.

Smaller firms use Agentforce to scale without staff

While Bahrololoumi and O’Sullivan emphasized that AI will empower rather than hinder the job prospects of graduates and junior workers, the duo also pointed to the potential benefits of the technology for smaller firms that can’t easily scale their workforce.

Bahrololoumi said Salesforce has seen a surge of interest, both globally but particularly in the UK, in its ‘commercial business’ category.

This is defined by Salesforce as enterprise customers that have $2 million or below in revenue. Growth across this category reached approximately 35% in Q1 2025, she explained, with double digit growth in Q2 and an expected 31% in Q3.

“I think it's interesting why we've seen this surge, because a commercial business or a mid-market business will not have the resources readily available to scale humans,” Bahrololoumi said.

“And yet they are growing because they're taking advantage of the technology that can enable them to grow and decouple that growth from headcount.”

As a result of this shift in interest, AI has actually increased hiring plans for Salesforce in its UK&I region, Bahrololoumi noted, as it now needs more sellers within the commercial business to meet demand.

AI isn’t affecting Salesforce hiring targets

Outside of this, Bahrololoumi revealed AI hasn’t reduced hiring targets but is changing the qualities sought in candidates. For example, certified engineers with experience and applied practice in generative AI are favored.

The same is true for many of its customers, she added, giving the example of a customer in private equity that won’t hire engineers for its portfolio company unless they have hands-on skills in the field.

In a separate panel at the event, Nathalie Scardino, president & chief people officer at Salesforce, explained that fresh graduates increasingly possess native digital and AI skills that lend themselves to career progression.

“We’re hiring a lot of AI natives,” said Scardino, explaining that Salesforce practices ‘reverse mentorship’ in which new graduates are paired with people throughout the organization such as forward-deployed engineers to share AI skills.

Salesforce onboarded around a thousand interns over the summer, Scardino added.

In addition to new hires, Salesforce is looking to equip its existing engineers with AI skills. O’Sullivan told attendees that this has been marked by a shift in focus over the past year.

“If we think about the existing community of engineers we’ve got, we're now being really prescriptive on carving out time to stay current, stay relevant,” he said.

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