CEO Marc Benioff announces massive workforce reduction as AI agents now handle half of customer conversations, maintaining the same satisfaction scores.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff announced that the cloud software giant has eliminated approximately 4,000 customer support positions, attributing the cuts directly to the deployment of AI agents that now handle half of all customer conversations.
The announcement, made during Benioff's appearance on "The Logan Bartlett Show" podcast, released Friday, marks one of the most concrete examples to date of AI's direct displacement of human workers at a major technology company.
A "Rebalancing" of the Workforce
"I was able to rebalance my head count on my support," Benioff said. "I've reduced it from 9,000 heads to about 5,000 because I need less heads." The reduction represents a staggering 45% cut in the support division, affecting roughly 5% of Salesforce's total workforce of 76,453 employees as of January 2025.
Benioff characterized the past eight months as "eight of the most exciting months of my career," even as the company implemented one of the largest AI-driven workforce reductions in the tech industry. The cuts come as Salesforce's AI agents, powered by its Agentforce platform, now successfully handle 50% of customer conversations, with human agents managing the remainder.
Productivity Gains and Untapped Opportunities
While the immediate impact has been significant job losses, Benioff framed the transformation as addressing a long-standing business challenge. "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," he revealed during the podcast. The AI agents are now enabling the company to call back approximately 10,000 leads per week that would have previously gone unaddressed.
The CEO compared the collaboration between AI and human agents to autonomous vehicles, explaining: "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 know actually know what's happening, you take over,' and that's kind of the same thing."
This hybrid model employs an "omnichannel supervisor" to manage the interaction between AI and human agents, ensuring seamless customer service delivery.
Stable Customer Satisfaction Despite Workforce Cuts
Perhaps most surprising to Benioff was that customer satisfaction scores (SEASAT) have remained unchanged despite the dramatic reduction in human support staff. "The scores were about the same, which was stunning," he said, suggesting that AI agents are performing at levels comparable to their human counterparts.
A Reversal from Earlier Statements
The mass layoffs represent a sharp reversal from Benioff's position just months earlier. In a July 2025 interview with Fortune magazine, he had dismissed fears of AI-driven job losses, insisting that "the humans are not going away" and that AI would augment rather than replace workers. At that time, he had suggested AI agents were "too unreliable to take humans out of the loop."
This isn't Salesforce's first round of significant layoffs. In January 2023, the company cut approximately 10% of its workforce, or about 8,000 positions, which Benioff later called a "bad idea" due to its poor execution. The current cuts, however, are explicitly tied to technological advancement rather than cost-cutting measures or economic pressures.
Despite the support staff reductions, Salesforce is still hiring in certain areas. The company is adding sales staff and "customer success" employees to help clients adopt AI technology, reflecting the evolving nature of work in the AI era. Benioff has also hinted at a potential hiring freeze for software engineers in 2025, suggesting that AI's impact may extend beyond customer service roles.
