Billionaire Marc Benioff, Owner of Time, Uses Magazine to Promote His AI Software

When he’s not buying up a weird amount of land in Hawaii or forcing his workers back into the office, billionaire Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is busy promoting the artificial intelligence technology that his company is looking to sell. This week, Benioff published an op-ed cover story in TIME magazine—an outlet Benioff bought from the Meredith Corporation in 2018—in which he made the case for why the coming wave of automation wrought by new AI technologies (like the one he is currently selling) is, in his own boring words, “a revolution that will fundamentally redefine how humans work, live, and connect with one another.”

“Over the past two years, we’ve witnessed advances in AI that have captured our imaginations with unprecedented capabilities in language and ingenuity,” Benioff writes. “And yet, as impressive as these developments have been, they’re only the opening act. We are now entering a new era of autonomous AI agents that take action on their own and augment the work of humans.”

Benioff’s essay deploys a now tired maneuver—long favored by Silicon Valley tech titans—which is to parlay utopian rhetoric (and thus, human optimism) into an aggressive advertising strategy designed to sell software. When Steve Jobs debuted the iPhone in 2007, he referred to it as a “revolutionary and magical product,” and supporters said it would “change the world.” When Facebook first launched in 2004, it also was said to be world-changing. Twitter, too, would shift the Earth on its axis. Crypto: same thing.

To be sure, all of these things have “changed the world”—though some people’s worlds have been changed more than others. The creators of these devices, for instance, are all fabulously rich, but how are the rest of us doing?

ArtifitiaI Intelligence, like all of its antecedents, is now upon us, and this “revolutionary” new product is ready to “change the world.” Relevantly, Benioff sells the very kind of software that his essay is about. How does Benioff foresee his AI agents transforming human life for the better? According to the billionaire, the primary benefit would be that the software can do jobs that humans used to do.

Benioff writes: “For the first time, technology isn’t just offering tools for humans to do work. It’s providing intelligent, scalable digital labor that performs tasks autonomously. Instead of waiting for human input, agents can analyze information, make decisions, and take action independently, adapting and learning as they go.” He goes on to give an example: “Take, for example, a large retailer during the upcoming holiday season. Traditionally, human workers or pre-programmed software might handle customer inquiries or inventory updates. But now, intelligent digital agents can respond to customer questions in real-time, monitor stock levels, reorder inventory, and even coordinate with shipping providers—all without human intervention.”

To be sure, replacing workers with software seems to be what Benioff is excited about. In a post on X promoting his essay, Benioff bragged that “digital labor” (i.e., AI) would transform “productivity without growing the workforce.” Roughly translated, companies can get more done with fewer people. Of course, Benioff is likely thinking about this from the C-suite perspective, where reduced headcount (and, thus, fewer salaries and holiday bonuses) is a good thing.

For the rest of us, though, companies with fewer jobs don’t sound all that appealing. Indeed, according to federal statistics, there are currently 7 million unemployed people living in the United States. Millions of others are “underemployed,” stuck in dead-end, low-wage jobs that provide little in the way of stability or hope for the future. According to federal statistics, there are close to 37 million people living in poverty in the U.S. More federal statistics show that the employment of workers aged 65 or older has grown by nearly 120 percent over the past twenty years, suggesting that many people are not earning enough to retire.

Given all of this context, my question to Benioff would be this: Why would you want to create an economy in which even fewer employment opportunities are available to people?

Benioff ends his screed with a weirdly elliptical sentence: “If trust is our north star as we navigate this new landscape, agents will empower us to make a meaningful impact at an unprecedented scale.” Observe, dear reader, the horrors wrought by an unholy union between baffling, obfuscatory corporate-speak and a misplaced plutocratic idealism. Trust as a “north star”? “Meaningful impact”? “Unprecedented scale”? It leaves the reader who hasn’t been pacified by Benioff’s boring word choice with a slew of questions: Who is trusting what? What sort of “meaningful impact” is going to occur, and what is being impacted?

Cutting through the bullshit, the message appears to be this: If we, as Americans, trust wealthy tech oligarchs like Benioff to radically transform the economy via their coveted methods of digital “disruption,” we will all be meaningfully “impacted” at an “unprecedented scale.” Don’t waste your time wondering about the specifics of said impact, just let the future wash over you with all its “revolutionary” glory.