Artificial Intelligence is shaking up the tech world yet again, this time at Salesforce. The American cloud software giant has cut 4,000 customer support jobs, leaning more heavily on AI to handle tasks that were once managed by people.
CEO Marc Benioff confirmed the move on the Logan Bartlett Podcast, revealing that the support team had been reduced from 9,000 to 5,000 employees. “I was able to rebalance my headcount on my support. I reduced it from 9,000 heads to about 5,000 because I needed fewer heads,” Benioff said. In effect, nearly half of Salesforce’s support division has been downsized.
The decision comes as a stark reversal from Benioff’s own comments just two months earlier. In July, he told Fortune that AI was meant to augment workers rather than replace them, stressing, “the humans are not going away.” At the time, he dismissed “scary narratives” about job losses and pointed to AI’s accuracy limits, arguing that “you need the human in the loop” because “AIs can’t fact check.”
Back then, Benioff also pushed back against AI leaders like Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, who predicted sweeping white-collar displacement. But now, the cuts show just how fast companies are pivoting as AI becomes more capable.
Salesforce isn’t only using AI in support, it’s also moving into sales. The company had been sitting on a massive backlog of over 100 million uncalled sales leads collected over 26 years.
According to Benioff, that is no longer a problem. “We now have an agentic sales that is calling back every person that contacts us,” he explained. Salesforce has rolled out an “omnichannel supervisor” to oversee how humans and AI agents split the workload, ensuring the system flags tasks that require a human touch.
Interestingly, in July, Benioff also said the company wasn’t planning to hire more software engineers, service agents, or even lawyers. The focus instead was on expanding sales teams to help customers adopt AI products. With Salesforce employing over 76,000 people at the start of 2025, the 4,000 cuts represent about 5 per cent of its global workforce, a sign of how quickly AI is reshaping corporate priorities.