Marc Benioff's AI Contradiction: Backing Job-Killing Startups While Denying Tech Job Losses

There's a growing gap between what technology leaders say about AI crushing human jobs and where their money is doing the talking.

Exhibit A is a new tech firm, June AI, co-founded in 2025 by Efrat Rapoport, a former Salesforce executive, along with Ohad Hen, Barak Goldstein, and Idan Tsitiat. The agentic AI helps businesses deploy AI agents across their existing software systems, automating tasks and integrating AI into complex internal operations.

Multi-billionaire Salesforce founder Marc Benioff, who recently told The Wall Street Journal that talk of AI replacing software giants like Salesforce and ruining their stock prices is dead wrong, is a major backer of the new agentic AI company.

In financially backing June AI and its mission, tech industry critics say Benioff is toeing the line between "AI will kill jobs" and his comments about the two technologies coexisting. Anxious software engineers may have nothing to worry about.

The Proof Is in the Pudding

Case in point, in a 2026 Forward Future podcast interview, Benioff told host Matthew Berman that AI is not ready to replace software engineers, adding that Salesforce software engineers, 15,000 strong, are "hugely augmented" by AI models.

"But still, those engineers are needed," Benioff said. "The model still cannot operate autonomously."

Salesforce, which has built its $162 billion market cap via cloud-based enterprise software for customer relationship management, is also increasingly using AI in its own company to achieve robust results. While the company's stock price has slid 25.4% year-to-date, shares have rebounded by over 15% in the past month, thanks in large part to the company's ambitious Agentforce platform, with company revenues estimated to rise by 13% in the first quarter of 2027.

In an August 2025 interview on "The Logan Bartlett Show", Benioff acknowledged that AI agents in Salesforce's customer support channels were already supplanting humans, which has led to more customer sales.

"It's been eight of the most exciting months of my career," Benioff said. "I was able to rebalance my headcount on my support. I've reduced it from 9,000 heads to about 5,000 because I need less heads."