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Salesforce has cut 4,000 customer support jobs and replaced them with artificial intelligence (AI) agents, CEO Marc Benioff said recently.
Benioff made the comments while discussing how the new technology is impacting the $248 billion computer software company’s headcount during an appearance on “The Logan Bartlett Show” podcast that was published on Friday.
“I was able to rebalance my headcount on my support,” Benioff said. “I’ve reduced it from 9,000 heads to about 5,000, because I need less heads.”
AI has been a boon for Salesforce, with the firm offering Agentforce and other AI-powered tools to its customers and for other companies.
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Chairman and CEO of Salesforce Marc R. Benioff attends the 54th annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland, January 18, 2024. (REUTERS/Denis Balibouse / Reuters Photos)
“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, adding that those same interactions are still happening today, but “50% are with agents, 50% are with humans.”
Benioff said that he doesn’t see managing a workforce that combines humans and AI agents as some nightmarish future.
Marc Benioff listens during a Bloomberg West television interview at the DreamForce Conference in San Francisco, California, U.S., on Thursday, Sept. 17, 2015. (Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images / Getty Images)
“I don’t think it’s dystopian at all,” he said. “This is reality, at least for me.”
The Salesforce logo is seen at its headquarters on December 1, 2020, in San Francisco, California. (Stephen Lam/Getty Images / Getty Images)
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Salesforce provided FOX Business Digital with the following statement when asked about Benioff’s remarks:
“At the start of this year we deployed help.agentforce.com,” the statement said. “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.”
Ticker Security Last Change Change % CRM SALESFORCE INC. 250.76 +6.68
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Benioff’s remarks come just months after he told Bloomberg that AI “is doing 30% to 50% of the work at Salesforce now.” Benioff said at the time that areas the company has been using AI to automate include engineering, coding and customer service tasks.
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The technology started seeing a significant increase in uptake in the wake of OpenAI releasing its ChatGPT chatbot in late 2022, spurring major investments and innovations in the sector.
FOX Business’ Aislinn Murphy contributed to this report.