Speaking ahead of Labor Day – celebrated in the US to recognize the nation’s labor movement – Salesforce CEO and co-founder Marc Benioff said the company had slashed 4,000 customer support roles through the application of AI agents.
“I’ve reduced it from 9,000 heads to about 5,000 because I need less heads,” he told The Logan Bartlett Show podcast on Friday, as if to underscore the need to humanize the tech workforce.
Benioff explained that he needed to “rebalance” the number of people employed in support with those in sales.
He said using AI agents had caused the rethink of the CRM SaaS company’s organizational shape and employment numbers. Now half of all conversations with customers are conducted by AI systems, Benioff claimed, with humans handling the rest. But LLMs could not do everything, he admitted.
He said that the new AI agents could call back all customer leads, whereas its human workforce had previously failed to return about 100 million calls due to staffing limits.
Benioff’s confidence in AI agents, which – entirely coincidentally – Salesforce is banking on selling to its customers, belies concerns about the technology’s effectiveness in the real world.
In June, IT consultancy Gartner said that more than 40 percent of agentic AI projects would be cancelled by the end of 2027 due to rising costs, unclear business value, or insufficient risk controls.
In fact, Salesforce’s own study provided a benchmark that showed LLM-based AI agents perform below par on standard CRM tests and fail to understand the importance of customer confidentiality. In June, a team led by Kung-Hsiang Huang, a Salesforce AI researcher, published results showing that GenAI agents achieved only a 58 percent success rate on tasks that can be completed in a single step without needing follow-up actions or more information.
Separate research from Forrester suggests that enterprise application vendors are using their entrenched positions among customers to end discounting and push high-margin AI products. “The era of monetization has begun,” the report states. Vendors under the microscope in the study included Oracle, SAP, Workday, Microsoft, ServiceNow, and Salesforce.
Benioff has been keen to show how AI will reap returns for investors. Last year, he said investors were worried that the pool of billable “seats” would shrink as AI agents took over human roles.
But he said consumption-based pricing for AI agents would ensure it was a “very high margin opportunity” for Salesforce.
Salesforce follows buy-now-pay-later outfit Klarna in wanting to reduce headcount with AI agents. CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski predicted he could cut 1,800 from the 3,800 people the company employs through AI investment. However, this spring, the company reportedly put more people back into customer service. Duolingo, meanwhile, said it would gradually phase out contractors for work that LLMs could do. ®