"Billionaire CEO Marc Benioff said his $248 billion Salesforce has cut about 4,000 customer service roles as AI agents step in to do the work. Just like Klarna and Microsoft, the Silicon Valley mogul revealed he just "needs less heads" now that the technology can handle over a million consumer conversations and has reduced support costs by 17% since around the start of 2025. It's a change of tune from Benioff's previous comments that AI wouldn't lead to a white-collar wipeout."
""I was able to rebalance my headcount on my support," Marc Benioff, CEO of the $248 billion computer software company, recently revealed on the podcast The Logan Bartlett Show. "I've reduced it from 9,000 heads to about 5,000, because I need less heads." "If we were having this conversation a year ago and you were calling Salesforce, there would be 9,000 people that you would be interacting with globally on our service cloud and they would be managing, creating, reading, updating, deleting data," he added. Today, those same interactions are happening, but "50% are with agents, 50% are with humans.""
Salesforce eliminated roughly 4,000 customer service positions after deploying AI agents to handle routine support tasks. The company reports AI now manages about half of service cloud interactions, reducing support headcount from roughly 9,000 to 5,000. AI agents have completed over one million consumer conversations and have lowered support costs by about 17% since early 2025. The workforce model now blends AI agents with human staff for remaining interactions. The company frames the change as an operational rebalancing rather than a dystopian outcome.
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