Salesforce Confirms 4,000 Job Cuts As AI Takes Over Customer Support

Half of Salesforce customer conversations are now handled by AI agents.

Marc Benioff says half of Salesforce’s customer conversations are now handled by AI agents and claims service quality is unchanged despite sweeping layoffs.

Salesforce has reduced its customer support workforce by nearly half, cutting 4,000 jobs this year as AI tools take on a larger share of customer service.

Chief executive Marc Benioff disclosed the scale of the cuts during an interview on The Logan Bartlett Show. “I was able to rebalance my headcount on my support. From 9,000 heads to about 5,000 because I need less heads,” he explained.

Benioff said AI now manages roughly 50 percent of all customer conversations, with humans handling the rest.

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

He compared the human-AI workflow to autonomous driving. “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 actually know what's happening, you take over,' and that's kind of the same thing.”

Benioff added that some human roles remain necessary for tasks that AI cannot yet handle.

Industry-Wide Shift Toward AI Automation

With this latest development, Salesforce joins a host of other firms in the Agentic AI adoption spree, which aims to streamline operations and reduce costs.

In June, IBM announced the dismissal of approximately 8,000 employees, with its HR department bearing the brunt of the cuts. IBM's recent layoffs, which saw the replacement of around 200 HR positions with AI-driven agents, are the result of a steady increase in the company's use of automation.

Similarly, automation software giant ServiceNow expects to save $100 million in staffing costs this year, crediting the savings to its internal use of AI. The business software maker reported robust second-quarter results, with revenue up 22.5% to $3.2 billion.

Since its 2024 launch, Salesforce's AI agent service, Agentforce, has been promoted by the CEO as a solution for global labor shortages. He has cited the success the company has had with the technology as a reason why it may not need to hire any new engineers in 2025.

Computing Says:

We’ve now seen several examples of companies such as Klarna and the Commonwealth Bank of Australia courting press and currying favor with investors by spending big on AI for the purposes of reducing headcounts but then repenting later down the line.

As the recent report from MIT showed, results from generative AI pilots are nowhere near meeting expectations in 95 percent of cases.

Many of the investments in agentic AI have been fueled at least partly by the expectation that improvements in that technology are inevitable – an expectation being increasingly called into question. Much depends on the quality of data feeding the models and agentic AI compounds the old ‘garbage in, garbage out’ equation.

It will be interesting to see how Salesforce customers experience their interactions with AI agents.

This article originally appeared on our sister site Computing.