Cursor, an AI-powered coding tool, has revealed that over 20,000 engineers within SaaS giant Salesforce use its platform as a part of their daily software development workflow.
This accounts for more than 90% of the company’s engineers, resulting in a 30% increase in pull request (PR) velocity.
“I would say that it’s 0 to 1 in terms of how Cursor has transformed the way our developers use tools to improve the quality of the product,” said Shan Appajodu, SVP of engineering at Salesforce, in the blog post.
Earlier, Salesforce invested in its own internal AI tools and an open-source code-generation tool called ‘CodeGenie’. “But Salesforce wanted its engineers to have a range of options, so it made Cursor available,” Cursor stated. “Junior engineers were the first adopters. Many had started their careers during the pandemic, when remote work made standard ways of learning a codebase unavailable. Cursor helped them catch up.”
Appajodu added that these junior engineers didn’t have any “senior engineers sitting with them and explaining a lot of things”. According to them, Cursor took their spot instead, and helped them better understand existing code so they could contribute more effectively.
Furthermore, he stated that senior engineers initially used Cursor for tedious and repetitive tasks that were “inefficient to tackle manually”. Eventually, they expanded the use case quickly to higher-value tasks.
“Adoption followed the same pattern across teams: a small group would try Cursor, see the impact, and the rest would follow. Within a few months, Cursor went from a new tool at Salesforce to one that nearly every single engineer at the company was using,” Cursor added.
Last August, Salesforce revealed that a team within the company, which maintains the data infrastructure powering its sales AI agent, had integrated Cursor into its software development process.
This was aimed at tackling a company-wide 80% code coverage mandate and accelerating testing across a legacy codebase with less than 10% coverage spread across dozens of repositories
By using Cursor to analyse coverage gaps, generate unit tests, and iteratively improve test quality, the team reduced unit test development time from 26 engineer days per module to just four days, achieving an 85% productivity gain while scaling coverage across more than 70 repositories.
