Salesforce CEO: 4000 support staff replaced by AI

Salesforce has replaced 4,000 employees in customer service and reallocated them to other areas, co-founder Marc Benioff announced. Instead, the US software company is focusing on AI assistance, which is set to take over a growing proportion of the company's work. The restructuring has enabled Salesforce to reduce the number of support staff and transfer them to growth areas.

"I've reduced the number from 9,000 to about 5,000 because I need fewer people", Benioff said in a podcast episode. According to Benioff, employees who no longer work in support could be deployed in sales. "This has increased my sales capacity," said Benioff. In the podcast episode, the company describes how it is testing its own AI agents with its own employees. In total, the company employs around 76,000 people worldwide.

AI assistance is reshaping the company

If you had called Salesforce a year ago, you would have been connected to one of the 9,000 employees worldwide. An AI system now handles these calls. Only small things are still done by people themselves, because the "big language models can do a lot, but they can't do everything."

Since AI has been used for customer conversations, Salesforce has been able to reconnect with neglected customers. Problems had arisen because there were too few employees to do this. "We now have agent-based sales that calls back every person who contacts us," explains Benioff. He compares its collaboration between people with the way Tesla's autopilot works.

(mack)