Key takeaways Salesforce cut 4,000 customer support jobs (44% reduction) while maintaining identical service quality scores through AI agents. The company froze all engineering recruitment for 2025 du...
Salesforce has reduced its customer support workforce from 9,000 to 5,000 employees, a cut of 4,000 positions, as the company increasingly relies on its AI agent platform Agentforce to handle customer interactions, CEO Marc Benioff revealed in a recent podcast interview.
Speaking on The Logan Bartlett Show, CEO Marc Benioff claimed the CRM company has cut its customer support workforce by almost 50% thanks to the use of its own agentic AI platform, Agentforce.
"We're customer zero for our new agentic service and support product at Salesforce," Benioff said. "We have now done about a million and a half conversations with our customers (through the agentic layer) and at the same time … a million and a half conversations also happened through our support agents during that same period. The SEASAT scores were about the same, which was stunning, and I was also able to rebalance my headcount on my support – I've reduced it from 9,000 heads to about 5,000 because I need fewer heads."
The dramatic workforce reduction hasn't negatively impacted customer satisfaction, according to Benioff. Despite these cuts, Benioff said the way the remaining humans are working with the AI agents, under the guidance of an omnichannel supervisor, "is the most exciting thing that's happened in the last nine months for Salesforce".
In a recent post on X, Benioff wrote: "In the past 90 days on our help service … Agentforce has managed 380,000 conversations with an 84% resolution rate."
The AI platform's effectiveness extends beyond customer service. Benioff has stated that AI agents are now doing 30% to 50% of all work within Salesforce itself, with the company reaching about 93% accuracy with the technology.
The workforce transformation goes beyond customer support. CEO Marc Benioff said Salesforce, San Francisco's largest private employer, does not plan to hire engineers this year because of the success of AI agents created and used by the company.
"We're not going to hire any new engineers this year. We're seeing a 30% productivity increase in engineering, and we're going to really continue to ride that up. And we're going to grow sales pretty dramatically this year," Marc Benioff said in a recent earnings call.
However, the company is expanding its sales force. "We will have more salespeople next year because we really need to explain to people exactly the value that we can achieve with AI. So, we will probably add another 1,000 to 2,000 salespeople in the short term," Benioff stated.
"My message to CEOs right now is that we are the last generation to manage only humans," Benioff said Wednesday on Salesforce's earnings call, indicating that companies of the future will have hybrid human and digital workforces.
Benioff added that Salesforce's mission is to become "the No. 1 digital labor provider, period" to other companies. Digital labor is performed by AI agents, which are software programs that use AI to perform tasks.
The broader tech industry is watching closely. Vernon Keenan, a senior industry analyst at Salesforce Devops, said the company's pause on hiring engineers is evidence of the "quiet erosion of entry-level jobs" that's a well-established pattern in Big Tech. "We might be entering the white-collar recession of 2025," Keenan said.
Launched at Salesforce's annual Dreamforce conference in 2024, Agentforce has shown traction. The company completed more than 3,000 paid deals involving Agentforce since October 2024. "Agentforce has been involved in 380,000 conversations through Salesforce's help website, with humans getting involved in 2% of cases," according to the company statement.
Almost half the Fortune 100 companies use Salesforce's AI and Data Cloud products, Benioff said in the earnings call.
Despite the workforce reductions, Salesforce has maintained revenue growth. The company reported USD 9.99 billion in revenue versus analysts' expectations of USD 10.04 billion, with revenue increasing 7.6% from a year ago in the quarter ending January 31.
"Agentforce will make a modest contribution to revenue in fiscal 2026, with a larger effect in the following year," said Amy Weaver, Salesforce's outgoing finance chief.
The company's AI strategy represents a fundamental shift in how enterprise software companies operate and price their services, with pricing on a consumption basis, approximately $2 per conversation for AI agent interactions.
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