Last week, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff announced in a post on X that the company would hire 1,000 new graduates and interns “to ride the AI exponential.” Today, the company released a statement committing to that plan.
Salesforce has launched a new Builder Program within its university recruitment initiative to fast-track recent grads into engineering, product, and sales roles focused on Agentforce, its proprietary AI agent system. The company said it has hired more than 10,000 professionals through its university recruitment program to date.
According to a recent LinkedIn report, entry-level hiring is down 6% year over year. Some major CEOs bet that AI will cause job displacement and disrupt careers, especially for entry-level candidates.
But Salesforce hopes to alleviate some of those bleak stats for new grads—at least in the name of AI.
“The AI-native generation entering the workforce today isn’t threatened by AI,” the company’s chief people officer, Nathalie Scardino, said in the announcement. “They’re the ones building it. Businesses can’t afford to wait for their workforce to catch up to AI. That’s why we’re betting on Builders now—to redesign how we work and redefine our business from the inside out.”
Recent graduates have faced a brutal job market. They’re applying to more jobs among fiercer competition, and settling for roles they feel overqualified for. According to a recent study by ZipRecruiter, many feel like AI itself is to blame for the situation: Nearly half (47%) of the recent grads surveyed said that artificial intelligence has impacted their field.
Still, it’s clear that Salesforce believes grads with AI fluency are the future of work—and will be the ones to get a spot at the table. With the new grad hire announcement, the company also launched its “Emerging Talent Playbook,” a guide meant to help other businesses bolster their own workforce with employees who are skilled with AI.
According to the ZipRecruiter study, new college grads don’t think that universities are properly training them for an AI-dominated job market. Just 23% of recent grads said that their school provided extensive AI training for professional use. Because Salesforce is only looking to hire young people who are in the know about AI, the anxieties that some new grads have around AI upskilling could swell. If other companies also decide to hire fresh talent with AI fluency as the baseline, that could create a widening gap between candidates who had early access to AI tools and those who didn’t—a gulf that could grow larger between younger workers and older workers.
Last year, Benioff said that Salesforce was using AI for up to 50% of its workload. The company said that AI customer service agents led to cuts of $100 million in support costs. This year, Salesforce furthered its partnership with Google Cloud to let AI agents work across both platforms.
While Salesforce has touted AI as a major productivity booster and cost reducer for the company, layoffs have also come with that. Over the last few years, Salesforce has laid off thousands of employees, including cuts earlier this year that impacted 1,000 employees. Last year, the company cut 4,000 customer support employees. In September, Benioff said that with the rapid innovation and implementation of AI tools at Salesforce, he “need[ed] less heads.”
“Because of the benefits and efficiencies of Agentforce, we’ve seen the number of support cases we handle decline and we no longer need to actively backfill support engineer roles,” Salesforce told NBC Bay Area at the time.
For new grads, a foot in the door at a major tech company like Salesforce is a rare bright spot—even if the hiring push comes as the same AI tools it wants them to build could potentially be the reason that they’re one day out of work.