Artificial intelligence (AI) has enabled Salesforce to cut 4,000 customer support roles this year, CEO Marc Benioff said on a recent podcast.
With AI agents taking on more tasks, the San Francisco tech giant’s support headcount has been reduced by nearly half.
“I’ve reduced it from 9,000 heads to about 5,000 because I need less heads,” Benioff said on “The Logan Bartlett Show.”
He laid out the change like this: “If we were having this conversation a year ago, and you were calling Salesforce, there would be 9,000 people that you would be interacting with globally on our service cloud and they would be managing, creating, reading, updating and deleting data.”
Now, half of those conversations are conducted by AI agents, with humans handling the rest, Benioff said.
The rise of AI agents, and rebalancing that followed, has also allowed Salesforce to “put those heads into sales,” where the company hasn’t had enough staff to keep up with demand, the CEO noted.
“There were more than 100 million leads that we have not called back at Salesforce in the last 26 years because we have not had enough people,” Benioff said.
He added: “We now have an agentic sales that is calling back every person that contacts us.”
Eventually, Benioff sees the 50-50 split between AI agents and humans expanding to the company’s other divisions, beyond support roles and into sales and marketing.
“This is really the beginning of every part of the company having this kind of agentic augmentation,” he said.
In a statement to the San Francisco Chronicle, a Salesforce spokesperson said the company has not been actively backfilling support engineer roles because of the efficiency gains from its AI agent platform.
“We’ve successfully redeployed hundreds of employees into other areas like professional services, sales, and customer success,” the spokesperson said.
Benioff, who co-founded Salesforce in 1999, has been more outspoken about his AI ambitions than many in Silicon Valley. Back in June, he told Bloomberg that AI was already doing 30 to 50 percent of Salesforce’s work — a striking figure for a company with more than 75,000 employees.
Investments in AI have also prompted job cuts at other major tech companies. In July, Microsoft announced it would be laying off nearly 4 percent of its workforce amid heavy AI spending. Meta slashed thousands of “low performers” earlier this year as the company pumps billions into AI.
When asked whether mainstream enterprises are starting to absorb AI, Benioff thinks it’s still early.
“We’re at the beginning of the beginning,” he said.
