Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff previously stated that AI is meant to augment workers rather than replace them. However, the company has now laid off 5 per cent of its workforce.
Following the rise of generative AI, the tech industry is undergoing a significant workforce realignment. Recently, Tata Consultancy Services announced a layoff of 12,000 employees as part of its strategy to become a “future-ready” organisation. Now, Salesforce, a company specialising in sales and customer service applications, has cut 4,000 jobs in its customer support division, with AI poised to replace these roles.
Need fewer people for same task
On the Logan Bartlett Podcast, Salesforce’s CEO revealed that the company has reduced its support team from 9,000 to 5,000 people—a nearly 45 per cent reduction. This decision was driven by the use of AI agents, which are now capable of handling routine customer interactions.
The company is also replacing human workers with AI on its sales team. Salesforce has a backlog of over 100 million uncalled sales leads collected over 26 years, and has now deployed an “agentic sales” system to contact every person who reaches out to the company.
Salesforce has also implemented an omnichannel supervisor to oversee workloads and flag tasks that still require a human touch.
Reversal from earlier stand
However, this move comes just two months after CEO Marc Benioff told Fortune that AI was intended to augment workers rather than replace them. At the time, he also noted the limitations of AI accuracy, stating that humans are necessary for fact-checking.
The layoffs represent approximately 5 per cent of Salesforce’s total workforce, which numbered over 76,000 employees as of January 2025. In July, Benioff also stated that the company had no plans to hire more software engineers, service agents, or lawyers. Instead, the focus was on expanding sales teams to help customers adopt AI products.
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