Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has confirmed that the company has cut around 4,000 customer support roles while shifting towards agentic AI to improve efficiency. The move allows Salesforce to reduce its reliance on human agents and reassign staff to areas where they are most needed.
“Help.salesforce.com is our agentic layer around our support, and this agentic service means that there is an omnichannel supervisor that is paying attention to the tension between my human support agents and my digital agents. As a result, we have been able to reduce the number of human agents that I have in support from about 9,000 to 5,000,” said Benioff.
He added that this decision has enabled Salesforce to redistribute its workforce. “That has allowed us to take that headcount and rebalance it into other parts of my company where we need more help,” he said during a recent SaaS podcast.
Benioff explained that the transition marks a major change in how the company is structured and how its technology is delivered. “I think this is very exciting, as it is a very huge change in how our company is structured and how our technology is built and delivered to our customers, and we are customer zero,” he said. “No, we do not feel the pressure to enter this talent-buying frenzy.”
He emphasised that Salesforce is focused on shaping the next generation of enterprise operations. “We are really looking at what is working and what is not working, and how do we go forward?” he added.
Benioff highlighted how agentic sales is transforming engagement. “The agentic sales is calling all the people who have been trying to get in touch with us over the last 26 years. The agentic sales is having conversations with them and deeply integrating it through our omni-channel supervisor to our new agentic sales product,” he said.
In the company’s Dreamforce product, humans and AI agents will collaborate. Benioff also pointed out that Salesforce’s AI is embedded across its data cloud. “It’s not just in our sales cloud and service cloud, not just Slack,” he said.
He explained that Salesforce has worked to unify its data. “So that you can get all your data harmonised in one place – which is why we bought Informatica also. So that everything is together, and now the AI could be more accurate,” he noted.
Benioff revealed that Salesforce’s data cloud and AI now generate over a billion in revenue, making it the company’s fastest-growing business.
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