Salesforce CEO Says Company Axed 4,000 Support Jobs Because of Agentic AI
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has become the latest Big Tech leader to note that the company he leads has shed jobs because of the impact of artificial intelligence.
On an entrepreneurship-focused podcast called the Logan Bartlett Show, Benioff said late last week that Salesforce has managed to cut 4,000 customer support roles after making itself “customer zero” for its agentic AI capabilities.
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“I was able to rebalance my headcount on my support. I’ve reduced it from 9,000 heads to about 5,000, because I need less heads,” Benioff said.
AI agents are designed to handle tasks with little input from humans and are beginning to pop up across business functions inside enterprises. Benioff said Salesforce has already started to integrate agents across the organization. Customer support is but one function where workflows have been impacted.
“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, deleting data,” he said. “Now all of a sudden here we are a year later, and the million and a half conversations that are happening…have now bifurcated. Fifty percent are with agents; 50 percent are with humans.”
Benioff said that after he “rebalanced [Salesforce’s] support headcount,” he determined that he may be able to add different jobs inside other functions, particularly sales.
“I can now put those heads into sales, so I’ve increased my distribution capacity, and now I’m also making sure that I have much more efficiency and productivity in my lead generation and in the ability to actually work with customers that are contacting me,” he said on the podcast.
That penchant for a better sales pipeline has been echoed throughout many of Benioff’s public statements in recent months. On the podcast, he noted that, during his tenure as CEO, Salesforce has failed to return more than 100 million calls; he expects Salesforce’s current team, paired with its agentic fleet, can now return any call it receives.
In Benioff’s eyes, the productivity upgrades AI has enabled to date are only the start of his aspirations. He said the jobs of the future will be significantly impacted by AI’s continued proliferation.
“This is really the beginning of every part of the company having this kind of agentic augmentation. It’s a force multiplier. It’s a synergistic effect between me and the agents,” he said, noting earlier in the conversation that he is “on a mission to make Salesforce an agentic enterprise.”
Benioff said this summer that AI handles as much as half of the work that goes on inside Salesforce today.
Benioff told Bartlett that the emerging reality is that companies will need to put guardrails in place to simultaneously manage humans and agents. When Bartlett suggested that the concept of managing automated agents “feels a little dystopian,” Benioff countered, noting that Salesforce envisions the role of an “omnichannel supervisor that’s kind of helping those agents and those humans work together” continuing to rise inside the enterprise.
“I don’t think it’s dystopian at all,” he said. “I think that this is reality, at least for me.”
Salesforce is far from the first company to act on the changes AI have made to its business model, nor the first to state its belief that AI will impact jobs outlook in the coming years. Klarna and Microsoft have each cut thousands of jobs in an effort to go all-in on AI.
In June, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in a memo that he expects the continued rollout of AI systems to have a negative impact on the number of jobs available inside the company’s corporate workforce.
“As we roll out more generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done. We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs,” Jassy wrote in the memo.
Tobias Lütke, CEO of Shopify, has taken a similar stance—he indicated in a memo this year that AI usage will become part of employees’ performance reviews and noted that teams need to be able to justify why AI can’t do the work before hiring a human to do it.
“Before asking for more headcount and resources, teams must demonstrate why they cannot get what they want done using AI,” Lütke wrote at the time. “What would this area look like if autonomous AI agents were already part of the team? This question can lead to really fun discussions and projects.”
