Evolving technologies should develop at a steady enough pace to adequately replace the jobs they eliminate, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff told CNBC on Tuesday.
"Technology's always taken jobs out of the system, and what you hope is that technology's going to put those jobs back in, too. That's what we call productivity," Benioff said on "Squawk Box" at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
"I think a lot of people don't understand how deep AI already is in so many things," he said, one being Salesforce's newly updated Einstein product, which Benioff said is not yet available to clients but can tell the company whether it will make or miss earnings estimates using artificial intelligence.
What business leaders at the WEF have been calling the "Fourth Industrial Revolution" is at the center of a global transformation in the technology space, as artificial intelligence, robotics and cloud computing gain traction, he said.
"What you hope is that the technology doesn't outpace the system so that it starts to strip the jobs away, and that's the fear of artificial intelligence," Benioff said.
But fear won't stop AI's inevitable foray into what's considered normal for businesses and consumers alike, Benioff said.
Looking forward, Benioff sees the struggle between developing technology and its economic contribution is how we control it.
"Now the question really is, with all of this new technology, how do we get growth?" he asked. "But that growth has to be balanced against trust, because when you have all this new technology, I think that the big question that's getting asked here is can we trust it?"
