Artificial Intelligence / News

What Is Marc Benioff’s ‘Digital Labor’ Movement?

By Henry Martin

Salesforce has shifted its focus to the world of agents, with its AI product Agentforce taking center stage in the ecosystem since it was revealed at Dreamforce ‘24. CEO Marc Benioff confirmed the company’s new focus last year, saying that “everything needs to become about Agentforce”, and their artificial intelligence suite was “the only thing that really matters today”.

When a ramped version of the flagship AI – dubbed Agentforce 2.0 – was unveiled in December, Marc spoke about how the world as we know it could change due to “digital labor” solutions, with Agentforce obviously spearheading this, in his own vision. So what exactly does “digital labor” mean – and does Marc’s vision have any merit? 

In Salesforce’s Own Words

Salesforce describes Agentforce as the “digital labor” platform for enterprises which enables a “limitless workforce”. This is achieved through the use of AI agents, which are assembled using a library of pre-built skills and, critically, can take actions across “any system or workflow”. 

The cloud giant, ever-keen to promote its customer success stories, name-drops several companies which are “augmenting their teams with digital labor”. This includes Accenture, The Adecco Group, Finnair, Heathrow Airport, IBM, Indeed, Saks Global, and SharkNinja.

Salesforce also makes a point of “eating its own dog food”, enabling Agentforce on their help site, help.salesforce.com – which greets visitors with a line of text asking, “How can Agentforce help?”

Agentforce 2.0 is marketed as ‘The Digital Labor Platform’.
Credit: Salesforce.

In the words of Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff: “Agentforce 2.0 cements our position as the leader in digital labor solutions, allowing any company to build a limitless workforce that can truly transform their business.”

Salesforce says that workplaces have more work to do than resources available, which leads to worse customer interactions and lengthy backlogs. 

Companies are looking to AI to help, but do not want solutions that provide generic responses. This is where “digital labor” – work performed by AI – comes in. 

Analysis: Looking Past the Slogans

Simply put: Businesses want to use machines to do work that humans currently do.

This is something of a sweeping statement, and there will certainly be exceptions, but from a company’s perspective, if an AI is cheaper, quicker, and produces results that are of the same (or higher) level of quality as a human, then that human might want to dust off their resumé. 

There are differing viewpoints on whether we truly have reached that point with agentic AI, or if it’s even a realistic vision of the immediate future.

The advocates of using artificial intelligence in this way are often quick to stress that their vision is one of humans and AI “working together”, or words to that effect. 

They may also say that this digital labor revolution will “free up” humans to pursue more meaningful, productive, creative (etc.) work. It is sometimes left to the listener to determine what exactly that means. 

In an optimistic scenario, this might mean that a human being who has important work to do but is swamped and constantly delayed by heaps of tedious administrative tasks is now free to pursue their primary function, with AI handling the boring, time-consuming, and repetitive jobs. 

It might paint a rosy picture if we imagine how much better the world would be if police officers, doctors, engineers, or essentially any worker were given more time to actually do their job and less time spent filling out paperwork. 

This is effectively what “digital labor” is meant to be, humans and machines “working together”, right? 

Some Are More “Freed Up” Than Others

While pro-AI groups say that their vision is one of cooperation between man and machine, there are still concerns about what exactly this means for non-digital – that is to say, human – labor. 

Salesforce Ben reported in December how Marc Benioff said that his company would not be hiring any more software engineers in 2025 amid significant productivity boosts from AI.

Benioff told the 20VC with Harry Stebbings podcast: “We’re not adding any more software engineers next year because we have increased the productivity this year with Agentforce – and with other AI technology that we’re using for engineering teams – by more than 30%.”

This, then, appears to be the “digital labor” revolution in action, and it echoes other comments made by Marc.  

The CEO said at the unveiling of Agentforce 2.0: “When we’re talking about agents, we’re talking about digital labor. When I took the Waymo here this morning, I got in the car and I hit the button ‘start ride’, it’s digital labor. The robot is bringing me here. It’s all happening digitally. There was nobody in the front seat. 

“The idea then [is that] robots are physical manifestations of agents – these agentic platforms are the fundamental enabling technology for the robotic layer.”

In this sense, it seems that the current wave of agentic AI is merely a precursor to the even greater potential of “digital labor” – that being robotics. 

Marc Benioff discusses digital labor at the Agentforce 2.0 launch.
Credit: Salesforce/YouTube

Benioff is somewhat looking towards the future when discussing this fourth wave of AI innovation. But in the here and now, he is not the only Silicon Valley leader to have had the idea of using AI to replace – or, at least, enhance – software engineers.  

Speaking on the Joe Rogan Experience in an episode uploaded on January 10, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that in 2025, we will “probably” see tech companies such as his using AI as a “sort of mid-level engineer” that can write code. 

“We’ll get to the point where a lot of the code in our apps – including the AI that we generate – is going to be built by AI engineers instead of people engineers,” he said.

However, Zuckerberg then added: “But I think that will augment the people working on it. My view on this is that in the future, people are just going to be so much more creative and are going to be freed up to do kinda crazy things.”

Whether being “freed up” means having more time in your role to do more productive things, or having to search for a new role entirely, remains to be seen. 

Final Thoughts 

Digital labor is the use of AI to create what Salesforce calls a “limitless workforce”, with machines taking over tasks from humans. 

Coming from the CRM giant Salesforce, it’s clear to see why this technology is being advertised as the next step in customer relationship management and adjacent fields. 

We will have to wait and see how exactly the expanding field of digital labor will transform the workplace as we know it – or whether it will at all. 

The Author

Henry Martin

Henry is a Tech Reporter at Salesforce Ben.

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