Salesforce, an American cloud-based software company is kicking off 2025 with a significant round of layoffs, with reports indicating that more than 1,000 employees will be affected. This amounts to over 1% of its total workforce.
It is unknown which divisions may see staff reductions, but affected workers will be able to seek other roles within the company. Reports reveal that Salesforce is simultaneously hiring aggressively for AI-focused gigs especially in sales, to drive its next phase of growth.
This comes after the company’s CEO Marc Benioff speaking at a company event in San Francisco last year, stated that the business software giant aims to hire 2,000 people to sell its Agentforce AI platform.
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“We’re adding another couple of thousand Salespeople to help sell these products. We already had 9,000 referrals for the 2,000 positions that we’ve opened up. It’s amazing”, he said.
The company which debuted its AI agent platform, Agentforce, in October, said the software’s second generation will be available in February 2025. Agentforce is a proactive, autonomous AI application that provides specialized, always-on support to employees or customers.
Employees can use Agentforce directly in Slack to handle busy work, answer questions, and deliver instant expertise, to enable them to stay focused on high-impact work. Agentforce will be able to tackle sophisticated questions in Salesforce’s Slack communications app, based on all available data. Users can equip Agentforce with any necessary business knowledge to execute tasks according to it its specific role.
The company’s CEO Benioff said Salesforce’s homepage now features an experimental Al agent that can respond to user queries about the company’s products. Salesforce customers in need of assistance can visit a chat-based help page that conducts 32,000 conversations a week. About 5,000 are getting escalated to humans as a result of current Al capabilities, down from 10,000 before, Benioff said.
Salesforce has long positioned Al as a critical pillar of its future, integrating advanced Al tools into its enterprise solutions. The CEO has been vocal about the potential and risks of Al adoption, reinforcing its strategic importance for the company.
Notably, Salesforce is restructuring its workforce to focus on Al innovation, betting that Al-driven products will generate higher revenue and efficiency. However, this raises concerns about job displacement as Al continues to transform traditional roles in tech.
The recent round of layoffs in favor of Al hiring highlights a growing trend that Al is reshaping the job market by automating certain roles while creating demand for new, highly specialized Al-related jobs.
What This Means for Human Jobs
1. Al is replacing repetitive tasks – Many jobs in customer service, sales, and data entry are being automated by Al-driven chatbots, virtual assistants, and machine learning models. Companies see Al as a way to reduce costs and increase efficiency.
2. Al is creating new job opportunities – While Al eliminates some roles, it creates demand for new ones, such as Al engineers, data scientists, machine learning specialists, and Al ethics consultants. These roles require advanced skills in Al development, deployment, and oversight consultants. These roles require advanced skills in Al development, deployment, and oversight.
3. The workforce must adapt – Employees in traditional roles may need to reskill or upskill to remain relevant. Learning Al-related skills can help them transition into Al-driven careers.
4. Al augments rather than fully replace some jobs – In many cases, Al is not eliminating jobs but changing how they are done. For example, Al in customer support (like Salesforce’s Agentforce) helps human workers handle more complex cases while automating routine queries.
It is worth noting that several giant tech companies, which include Meta, Google Microsoft, and IBM, amongst others, are prioritizing Al investments. Also, businesses are shifting focus to Al-driven growth, meaning workers in traditional roles must prepare for continuous industry disruption.