Marc Benioff says Salesforce has cut 4,000 roles in support because of AI agents

AI agents are making a major dent in Salesforce's head count.

In an episode of "The Logan Bartlett Show" released on Friday, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said AI agents in the customer support division were replacing humans, helping the company work through more sales leads.

"It's been eight of the most exciting months of my career," Benioff said.

"I was able to rebalance my head count on my support," he said. "I've reduced it from 9,000 heads to about 5,000 because I need less heads."

The company employed 76,453 employees across divisions as of January.

"At the start of this year we deployed help.agentforce.com. Because of the benefits and efficiencies of Agentforce, we've seen the number of support cases we handle decline and we no longer need to actively backfill support engineer roles. We've successfully redeployed hundreds of employees into other areas like professional services, sales, and customer success" a Salesforce spokesperson said in a statement to Business Insider.

AI agents or assistants break down a task into multiple smaller steps, each tackling a specific task to achieve a broader objective. These AI agents have boosted the company's productivity, Benioff said.

"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," he said. "But we now have an agentic sales that is calling back every person that contacts us."

Benioff, who cofounded Salesforce in 1999, said an "omnichannel supervisor" helps human and AI agents collaborate with customers.

He said 50% of conversations were being done by AI and 50% by humans, which wasn't the case last year. Benioff said working together is important because AI agents can realize that they can't handle a task and need human support.

"It's not any different than you're in your Tesla and all of a sudden it's self-driving and goes, 'Oh, I don't know actually know what's happening, you take over,' and that's kind of the same thing," Benioff said.

Agentic AI has become a key buzzword in tech leaders' roadmaps for the future of the workforce.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is among the biggest enthusiasts for AI agents and has said that they will boost, not cull, head count.

On a podcast last year, Huang said that he interacted with AI agents and that Nvidia used agents for cybersecurity, chip design, and software engineering.

"When companies become more productive using artificial intelligence, it is likely that it manifests itself into either better earnings, or better growth, or both," Huang said. "When that happens, the next email from the CEO is likely not a layoff announcement."

On a podcast released last week, Microsoft's AI platform product lead, Asha Sharma, said the rise of AI agents could strip out layers of management and change how companies are run.