- Salesforce has replaced thousands of workers with Agent AI
- CEO Marc Benioff said he “needs[s] minor heads ”to clear an afterlone
- People still bring valuable creativity but AI adds efficiency
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has revealed that the company has almost halved its workforce for customer support and replaces thousands of jobs with AI agents.
In a podcast interview with Logan Bartlett on YouTube, Benioff said brutally, “I need smaller heads,” and notice how Salesforce instead of using Human Power, now uses AI to process about 10,000 leads weekly.
In the same interview, Benioff noted that a lack of human resources had led the company to get a backlog of 100 million unsolicited leads over 26 years.
Salesforce slopes Customer Service Head
The fall of 45% from 9,000 to 5,000 comes as the company’s own AI platform, Agentforce, now handles about half of all customer interviews (about 1.5 million interactions) – some human workers are still to handle the rest.
The remaining workers are also not free of AI – they work under what Benioff calls an “Omni Channel Supervisor who helps help these agents and these people work together.”
It seems that customer satisfaction results from AI and human interactions have been about the same, which may spell a troubled future for human customer service staff.
Benioff framed AI tools as a way of tackling work shortages on labor as well as its cost-saving benefits-it now handles about 30-50% of the work in some areas as support.
Looking ahead, CEO (who previously said that today’s generation of CEOs is the last one to administer only human workers) that every business is now on a path to becoming an agent business.
Despite his preference for replacing human workers with AI, Benioff still criticized companies for not hiring fresh grades, changing them to miss an opportunity. Young talent that embraces Agentic AI is among the most likely to succeed.
Obviously, it’s about striking the right balance between productivity, where Benioff himself recognizes both people’s unique and creativity and the need for AI protection frameworks.
