Salesforce slashes 4,000 jobs as AI reshapes customer support, says CEO Benioff

New Delhi: Salesforce has laid off 4,000 customer support employees, reducing its support workforce from 9,000 to 5,000, as artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly takes over service operations. 

CEO Marc Benioff announced the cuts during an appearance on the Logan Bartlett podcast, released Friday, describing the move as a “rebalancing” of headcount driven by AI advancements.

“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 layoffs, representing a 45% cut in the support division, come as Salesforce’s AI agents now handle 50% of customer conversations, with human agents managing the rest. Benioff called the past eight months “the most exciting” of his career, highlighting how AI has transformed the company’s operations.

The workforce reduction marks a sharp contrast to Benioff’s earlier statements. In July 2025, during a Fortune interview, he dismissed fears of AI-driven job losses, insisting that “the humans are not going away” and that AI would augment rather than replace workers. 

He argued that AI’s accuracy, limited to about 90% even with company data, required human oversight, stating, “AIs can’t fact-check because they don’t have that level of accuracy.” Benioff also positioned himself against AI startup CEOs like Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, who predicted significant white-collar job displacement due to AI.

Salesforce’s AI platform, Agentforce, has been central to this shift. The company uses an “omnichannel supervisor” system to coordinate human and AI agents, allowing AI to recognize when tasks require human intervention, similar to a Tesla’s self-driving feature handing control back to the driver. This system has enabled Salesforce to address a backlog of over 100 million uncalled sales leads accumulated over 26 years, with Benioff noting, “We now have an agentic sales [team] that is calling back every person that contacts us.”

Despite the layoffs, Benioff emphasized that customer satisfaction scores (SEASAT) have remained stable, with AI and human agents each handling about 1.5 million customer conversations in recent months. “The scores were about the same, which was stunning,” he said. As of January 2025, Salesforce employed 76,453 people across all divisions, making the 4,000 cuts roughly 5% of its total workforce.

The move reflects a broader trend in the tech industry, where companies like Klarna, IBM, and Microsoft have also reduced staff while integrating AI to boost efficiency. 

In July, Benioff announced Salesforce would freeze hiring for software engineers, customer service agents, and lawyers, while adding sales staff to help customers adopt AI technology.

The layoffs follow previous reductions at Salesforce, including 7,000 jobs cut in January 2023, which Benioff later called a “bad idea” due to its execution during a two-hour all-hands call. 

Those cuts were attributed to overhiring during the pandemic, but the latest reductions are explicitly tied to AI adoption, raising questions about the future of white-collar work.