Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff speaks to thousands at the Moscone South Hall during Dreamforce in San Francisco on Tuesday, Sept. 17, 2024. The tech giant has cut 4,000 customer support roles this year after deploying artificial intelligence agents to handle a growing share of the company’s work, Benioff said in a new podcast.
Brontë Wittpenn/The ChronicleSalesforce has cut 4,000 customer support roles this year after deploying artificial intelligence agents to handle a growing share of the company’s work, CEO Marc Benioff said in a new podcast.
Speaking on The Logan Bartlett Show ahead of Labor Day weekend, Benioff said the San Francisco software giant reduced its support staff by nearly half.
“I’ve reduced it from 9,000 heads to about 5,000 because I need less heads,” he said in the episode released Friday.
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The CEO, who co-founded Salesforce in 1999, called the past eight months “the most exciting” of his career, even as the company trimmed thousands of jobs.
He said the reorganization also allowed Salesforce to shift workers into growth areas.
“I’ve rebalanced my support head count as I said, so I can now put those heads into sales,” Benioff said. “So I’ve increased my distribution capacity.”
Salesforce remains San Francisco’s largest private employer, with roughly 76,000 workers worldwide.
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Benioff said AI agents — which break down complex tasks into smaller steps and can independently complete assignments — have reshaped the company’s operations.
“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,” he said.
Now, half of all conversations with customers are conducted by AI systems, with humans handling the rest.
“These large language models can do a lot of things but they cannot do everything,” Benioff said.
The shift has also allowed Salesforce to reconnect with customers long overlooked. For decades, the company failed to return more than 100 million leads due to staffing limits, he said.
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“We now have an agentic sales that is calling back every person that contacts us,” Benioff said.
He compared the balance to Tesla’s self-driving technology.
“All of a sudden it’s self-driving and goes, ‘Oh, I don’t actually know what’s happening, you take over,’” Benioff said. “That’s kind of the same thing.”