Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff speaks at the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco on September 17, 2024.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Salesforce will hire 2,000 people to sell artificial intelligence software to customers, CEO Marc Benioff said Tuesday, doubling the number the company said it wanted to add a month ago.
The cloud software company, which targets salespeople, marketers and customer service representatives, is one of many tech companies looking to boost revenue with generative AI features.
“We’re adding a few thousand more vendors to help sell these products,” Benioff said at a company event in San Francisco. “We already had 9,000 referrals for the 2,000 positions we opened. It’s amazing.”
Last month, Benioff told Bloomberg it planned to hire 1,000 salespeople focused on AI.
On Tuesday, Salesforce said the second generation of its Agentforce technology for creating and operating AI agents will be available to customers in February 2025. Agentforce will be able to answer advanced questions in Salesforce’s Slack communications app, based on all available data.
Salesforce is expanding its AI sales team, nearly two years after announcing it would lay off more than 7,000 employees to better reflect economic conditions. As of Jan. 31, 2024, its workforce stood at 72,682, down about 1% from two years earlier, the documents show.
Benioff said that Salesforce’s homepage now includes an experimental AI agent that can respond to user questions about the company’s products. Salesforce customers who need help can visit a chat-based help page that handles 32,000 calls per week. About 5,000 are being escalated to humans as a result of current AI capabilities, up from 10,000 previously, Benioff said.
Microsoft has sold a range of Copilot-branded AI tools. But if you look on Microsoft’s website to see how it automates customer support, Benioff said, “You can’t find it.”
Microsoft did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
