Humans in the Loop

I stumbled upon a rather superb article in the FT: Humans must remain at the heart of the AI story. It’s rare to see a tech CEO make a case for keeping hearts in the machine, but that’s exactly what Marc Benioff does. As the co-founder and CEO of Salesforce, Benioff could be forgiven for leaning into metrics, margins, and machine learning. Instead, he makes a clear and necessary plea: we must not write ourselves out of our own story.

Benioff’s argument is less about resisting AI than reshaping how we partner with it. As I have said, AI is inevitable. Instead, he frames AI not as our replacement but as a potential amplifier — a tool that can augment human effort rather than automate it into irrelevance. He reminds us that AI doesn’t love, grieve, or dream. And that absence of memory, emotion and fallibility is a void.

Benioff sees the productivity, the efficiency, the innovation. Salesforce’s own platforms are generating results. But he returns, again and again, to the idea that real transformation must be human-shaped. That tech’s greatest role is to lighten the load of overwhelmed nurses, teachers, and frontline workers.

It matters that this message comes from someone like Benioff. This is a leader who’s long advocated for stakeholder capitalism and corporate responsibility, sometimes to the dismay of his peers. He’s made headlines for integrating philanthropy into Salesforce’s DNA and for pushing climate and social justice initiatives in places where such topics are valued for their marketing optics rather than their real world need. His call to keep humans central isn’t new rhetoric. It’s consistent practice.

And he’s right. The question is not whether AI will change work — it already is. The question is whether we’re prepared to evolve with it, or if we’ll outsource the soul of our efforts to a stack of servers. The best tech supports human intuition. It doesn’t simulate it. And while AI can produce code and scan medical data, it still can’t offer the moment of insight that turns noise into signal. It can’t ask, “Are you okay?” and mean it.

Benioff is urging the design systems that serve people, not the other way around. To reimagine job roles, to upskill with empathy, and to remember that technology works best when it remembers who it’s working for. That future, he says, isn’t inevitable. It’s intentional. And that rings true. Humans in the loop.

So what about you? As AI continues to thread itself into the seams of daily life, how will you stay in the story? What do you want the human role to be?

We’d love to hear what you think.