A few months after Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff announced plans to hire 2,000 new salespeople to sell Agentforce, its latest AI product, Salesforce is cutting jobs.
According to a Bloomberg report, Salesforce is laying off more than 1,000 people in unspecified divisions, though affected employees can apply for other roles in the company.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. Photographer: Stefan Wermuth/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Salesforce’s January 31, 2024, annual report said it has 72,682 global employees. The company laid off about 10% of its staff, or 7,000 employees in January 2023, 700 workers in January 2024, and another 300 in July.
Despite announcing the new layoffs, Salesforce appears to be hiring for new roles—or at least on screen. The company’s careers site at the time of writing brings us 848 “account executive” keyword-matched roles in locations around the world.
What is Agentforce?
Agentforce can complete multi-step tasks like answering customer questions and scheduling meetings without human supervision for $2 an interaction. In an interview with CNBC in December, Benioff said that Salesforce has sold Agentforce to 1,000 paying customers. Disney, Saks, Wiley, and OpenTable are all using the technology.
Benioff also said that Salesforce uses Agentforce—and highlighted its potential to replace human work. The company answers about 36,000 customer questions per week, and 10,000 of those questions are usually answered by humans. The AI allows Salesforce to lower the number of questions humans answer to 5,000.
Related: Salesforce CEO Says the Company’s New AI Agents Could Replace Human Jobs
The combination means that Salesforce can cut human staff in favor of AI.
“We can have less human support agents, more digital support agents,” Benioff told CNBC.
Salesforce will report its next quarterly earnings on February 26.
