- Salesforce replaced thousands of workers with an agentic AI
- CEO Marc Benioff said he had “needed[s] less heads ”to erase a backlog
- Humans always bring precious creativity, but AI adds efficiency
The CEO of Salesforce, Marc Benioff, revealed that the company had almost halved its customer workforce, replacing thousands of jobs with AI agents.
In an interview with Podcast with Logan Bartlett on Youtube, Benioff brutally declared: “I need fewer heads”, noting how instead of using human power, Salesforce now uses AI to treat around 10,000 leads each week.
However, in the same interview, Benioff noted that a lack of human resources had led the company to accumulate a backlog of 100 million tracks not called over 26 years.
Salesforce Slashes Customer Service Headcount
The drop of 45% from 9,000 to 5,000 is the company’s own AI platform, Agentforce, now manages about half of all customer conversations (approximately 1.5 million interactions) – some human workers remain to manage the rest.
The remaining workers are not free from AI either – they will work under what Benioff calls an “Omni Channel supervisor who helps these agents and humans to work together”.
It seems that the Customer satisfaction scores of the AI and human interactions have remained almost the same, which could explain a disturbing future for workers in human customers.
Benioff has supervised AI tools as a means of responding to labor shortages as well as its cost reduction benefits – it now manages around 30 to 50% of work in certain areas, such as support.
For the future, the CEO (which previously declared that today’s generation of CEO is the last to manage only human workers) considers that each company is now on the path of an agency company.
Despite his preference for replacing human workers with AI, Benioff has always criticized companies for not having hired new graduates, making them miss for missing an opportunity. Young talents that adopt agentic AI are among the most likely to succeed.
Obviously, it is a question of finding the right productivity balance, Benioff himself recognizing both the unique character and the creativity of humans, and the need for Guardians of the AI.
