Last year, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff stated that AI would never be able to replace human salespeople, claiming the technology “doesn’t have a soul” and lacks the irreplaceable value of face-to-face communication.

This week, it was announced that the technology giant quietly eliminated 1,000 job positions.

However, Salesforce is not alone. Already in 2026, the wider technology sector has been busy with job cuts – with Telstra doing the same this week to support its AI rollout. Likewise, Ericsson, Meta, and TCS announced workforce reductions in January, cutting thousands of industry jobs to refocus on AI and improve cost positions.

As the technology industry battles to stay ahead in the global AI race, job cuts have inevitably raised concerns over if they technology really is taking jobs away from workers – and if these cuts could impact the rate of innovation.

An ‘AI paradox’  

Despite Benioff publicly insisting that AI won’t replace humans, Salesforce job cuts have often been attributed to its expanding AI capabilities lowering the need for large support teams. The company’s recent cuts were attributed to marketing, product management and data analytics parts of the business, in addition to its Agentforce AI product unit, Business Insider said on Monday.

Speaking at the time, Benioff said AI agents have also made the company more productive, adding: “There were more than 100 million leads that we have not called back at Salesforce in the last 26 years because we have not had enough people … we now have an agentic sales team that is calling back every person that contacts us.”

AI agents have become very popular in the tech world, with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman imagining how AI agents could interact with each other and lead to new types of interactions, and calling for software to be optimised for AI agents to help make people more productive moving forward.

“The capability of AI feels to me the biggest it’s ever been,” Altman said at the Cisco AI Summit. “We are planning for a world where demand will grow at an accelerated pace each year.”

He added: “Companies that are not set up to quickly adopt AI workers will be at a huge disadvantage. And it’s going to take a lot of work and some risk.”

The impact on innovation

AI is very good at optimising efficiencies and getting results quickly, but there are lots of opinions about how much AI is to blame for these job cuts, with Goldman Sachs Research suggesting in August 2025 that AI adoption would only have a “relatively temporary” impact on employment levels.

In fact, January 2026 has been the worst month for job cut announcements since the recession in 2009, with US companies announcing more than 100,000 cuts. It was recently reported that job losses in the UK are twice the international average, with Morgan Stanley citing a net loss of more than 8% over the past 12 months.

London Mayor Sir Sadiq Khan said AI could lead to a new era of mass unemployment and inequality.

“We mustn’t drift, absentmindedly, into a future we didn’t ask for and don’t want,” he said in his annual speech. “We need to wake up and make a choice: seize the potential of AI and use it as a superpower for positive transformation and creation or surrender to it and sit back and watch as it becomes a weapon of mass destruction of jobs.”

As the technology has shifted to a more foundational strategy for businesses, it’s clear that the positive impacts of the technology have been felt much faster than expected.

What this could create is long-term risks to digital innovation. If job cuts are disproportionate or reactive, it could reduce training opportunities to develop future senior talent. In other words, it leaves larger talent gaps.

Andrew McLernon, co-founder and CEO of Interlink, previously told Capacity that it all depends on how companies choose to use AI – whether that’s for fast, short-term impact, or including it in a much lengthier strategy.

“If AI is treated purely as a cost-cutting tool, then yes, it becomes a shortcut to reducing headcount,” he said. “But when it’s used properly, AI creates headroom. It takes care of the heavy lifting so people can focus on judgment, creativity, experience and building trust, all the things AI simply can’t replicate.”

Speaking with Capacity, a Salesforce spokesperson said: “Over the course of the last year, we’ve evolved nearly every part of our business with AI. Because of the benefits and efficiencies of Agentforce, we haven’t had to backfill support engineer roles even as demand for customer support grew.

“Instead, we redeployed hundreds of employees to high-growth areas in the business, and we’ve created net new roles like Deployment Strategists, AI Conversation Designers and AI Architects.”

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