Salesforce cuts 4,000 support roles due to AI agents

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff revealed last week that the cloud-based software giant has reduced the number of its staff in support roles from 9,000 to 5,000 because ‘AI agents’ are automating their tasks. 

Appearing on podcast ‘The Logan Bartlett Show’ on Friday, Benioff said Salesforce has replaced humans in its customer support division with an AI agent platform to work through more sales leads.

"I was able to rebalance my head count on my support," he said. "I've reduced it from 9,000 heads to about 5,000 because I need less heads."

The company employed over 76,000 employees as of January. 

Salesforce said that its AI platform, Agentforce, can be used by businesses to deploy AI agents for customer service and employee support roles.

“Because of the benefits and efficiencies of Agentforce, we've seen the number of support cases we handle decline and we no longer need to actively backfill support engineer roles,” a Salesforce spokesperson said in a press statement.

 

“We've successfully redeployed hundreds of employees into other areas like professional services, sales, and customer success," a Salesforce spokesperson said in a statement to Business Insider.

AI agents or assistants are autonomous systems designed to break down a task into smaller steps, allowing them to learn and adapt to situations quickly with minimal human intervention. It is these systems that are now ‘managing, creating, reading, updating, deleting data’ in Salesforce’s service cloud alongside humans and are increasing productivity, Benioff said.

"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 said. "But we now have an agentic sales [program] that is calling back every person that contacts us."

Agentic AI has become an industry darling, with tech leaders embracing it as the future of the labour force.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has been one of agentic AI’s most notable proponents, telling attendees at the CES 2025 in January that ‘the age of AI agentics is here’ and that it offers 'a multi-trillion dollar opportunity' that will transform how people work.

 

In a podcast released earlier in August, Microsoft’s AI platform product lead, Asha Sharma, said the AI agents could potentially eliminate layers of management and change how companies are run. 

"The org chart starts to become the work chart," Sharma said, adding that workers may soon bring a personal ‘agent stack’ to the office that they can use to gain access to 'a set of skills that you never had before’.