Billionaire CEO Marc Benioff has revealed that Salesforce has cut about 4,000 customer service roles as artificial intelligence agents step in to take over much of the workload, per Fortune.
The $248 billion cloud software giant is the latest tech heavyweight to openly embrace automation at the expense of human workers, a shift that underscores how quickly AI is reshaping the corporate labor landscape.
Just like Klarna and Microsoft, Salesforce is now leaning heavily on generative AI agents that can handle over a million consumer conversations, cutting support costs by 17% since the start of 2025. Benioff, once skeptical about AI-driven layoffs, now says bluntly that he “needs less heads.”
“I was able to rebalance my headcount on my support,” Benioff said on The Logan Bartlett Show podcast. “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 you’d be interacting with globally on our service cloud. Today, those same interactions are happening, but 50% are with agents, 50% are with humans.”
The shift highlights a dramatic change of tune. Fortune notes in the report that when ChatGPT launched only three years ago, leaders, including Benioff and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, repeatedly argued that AI would augment workers rather than replace them. In fact, as recently as last year, Benioff told Fortune that mass layoffs “weren’t on the table,” insisting that AI lacked the precision to displace humans.
Now, the reality looks very different.
Salesforce’s Hybrid Workforce Model
Benioff insists that Salesforce’s hybrid workforce—half human, half AI—shouldn’t be seen as dystopian. “I don’t think it’s dystopian at all,” he said. “This is reality, at least for me.”
Salesforce confirmed that its in-house platform, help.agentforce.com, has been a key driver of the changes.
“Because of the benefits and efficiencies of Agentforce, we’ve seen the number of support cases we handle decline, and we no longer need to actively backfill support engineer roles,” a Salesforce spokesperson told Fortune.
The company added that it has redeployed hundreds of employees into professional services, sales, and customer success.
Still, customer support remains the sharpest casualty. Benioff himself has repeatedly identified support and sales as the two functions with the highest potential for automation. Already, agents complete 30–50% of Salesforce’s customer interactions. By pushing further into automation, the company has slashed costs while maintaining service coverage.
Benioff also hinted at broader ambitions. “I’m looking at every single function to see how it can become an agentic business,” he said.
Industry-Wide AI-Driven Layoffs
Salesforce is not alone. Across Silicon Valley, firms that once dismissed AI job displacement are now actively reshaping their workforce.
Microsoft has announced 15,000 job cuts this year—including 9,000 in July—despite posting an 18% year-over-year increase in net income last quarter. Many of those roles are customer-facing, echoing Salesforce’s pivot. Meta eliminated 3,600 roles in February, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg forecasting that AI could serve as a “mid-level engineer” before the year ends. Google has also axed hundreds of roles across its Android, Pixel, and Chrome teams, citing the need to redirect resources into AI.
Klarna, often seen as one of the earliest adopters of large-scale AI customer service, has shown how radically the technology can scale. Its digital agents now handle the equivalent work of 700 staffers. But in a notable reversal, Klarna recently announced that it is redeploying workers back into customer-support roles after its CEO admitted that earlier AI-driven cost-cutting went too far. The move highlights both the promise and the pitfalls of automation—while AI can slash costs, an overreliance risks eroding the quality of customer experience.
The Salesforce layoffs mark a sobering inflection point in the AI adoption curve. When generative AI systems like ChatGPT, Claude, and Bard burst onto the scene in late 2022, the narrative from industry leaders was that AI would primarily augment human tasks. CEOs pointed to collaboration models where humans supervised AI outputs, maintaining a sense of security for white-collar jobs.
But as the technology rapidly matured, the business case for cost-cutting proved irresistible. Customer service and sales—two of the most labor-intensive corporate functions—have emerged as the first frontiers. For Salesforce, the result has been a 17% reduction in support costs, achieved in less than a year.
Benioff frames the moment as one of excitement, not despair. “There’s also an omni-channel supervisor now that’s helping those agents and those humans work together,” he said. “And this is the most exciting thing that’s happened in the last nine months for Salesforce.”
A Familiar Silicon Valley Shift
Salesforce’s pivot mirrors historical moments when new technologies displaced entire categories of work. Call centers were once the backbone of customer engagement, but cloud-based automation and chatbots have already eroded their dominance. Now, generative AI is accelerating that erosion, enabling scalable, personalized conversations that were once the domain of human agents.
As AI moves deeper into sales and support, two of the most people-heavy business units, the corporate promise of AI as an “augmenter” is giving way to a harsher truth: companies are embracing bots because they’re faster, cheaper, and tireless.
And the cuts may only be beginning.