$300 Mn on Anthropic, Zero on Engineers: Inside Salesforce's AI Pivot

When Salesforce announced in 2024 that it would stop hiring software engineers, it raised eyebrows across Silicon Valley. A year later, CEO Marc Benioff is not looking back. Instead, he is placing a $300 million bet on artificial intelligence, one that suggests the days of large software engineering teams may be numbered.

Speaking on the All-In podcast, Benioff singled out Anthropic as a standout partner, revealing that Salesforce expects to spend approximately $300 million on Anthropic's AI tokens in 2026, with the bulk of that tied to coding-related work. "These coding agents are awesome. Anthropic is awesome," he said. "Coding, everything's going to be cheaper to make. It's more efficient. I can do things that I just could not do before."

The speed gains, he added, have been equally striking. "I can go faster than ever before. I can implement my software and sell it at the same time. I've never been able to do that before."

A New Way of Running a Company

Benioff described a fundamental shift in how Salesforce now operates. "Today, I have humans, agents, and headless platforms all interoperating. Never before," he said, adding that efficiency gains were visible across every major function, from service and support to marketing and distribution. "What I can do for our customers: unprecedented."

He closed with an unambiguous endorsement of Anthropic. "My gosh, have you seen Anthropic? It is a rocket ship that will not stop."

The Numbers Behind the Narrative

Benioff's enthusiasm is backed by hard data. Salesforce first announced a hiring freeze on software engineers in early 2025, citing productivity gains of over 30% from AI tools. By mid-2025, AI was handling 30 to 50% of work across the company. By September, Salesforce had cut its customer support headcount from 9,000 to 5,000, replacing those roles with AI agents.

The broader context makes the $300 million figure even more striking. Anthropic's annualised revenue grew from $1 billion in early 2025 to over $30 billion by April 2026, a pace without precedent in enterprise software history. Salesforce itself took nearly 20 years to reach that revenue milestone. Anthropic did it in under three years.