Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff announced the company has cut 4,000 customer support jobs, nearly halving the department from 9,000 to 5,000 employees. The major workforce reduction comes as artificial intelligence now handles about half of all customer conversations at the cloud software giant.
Speaking on the Logan Bartlett podcast, Benioff explained the dramatic shift: “I was able to rebalance my head count on my support. I’ve reduced it from 9,000 heads to about 5,000 because I need less heads.”
The cuts represent roughly 5% of Salesforce’s total global workforce of about 76,000 employees. Benioff described the past eight months as “eight of the most exciting months of my career,” highlighting how quickly AI has transformed the company’s operations.
The layoffs mark a sharp reversal from Benioff’s stance just two months earlier. In July 2025, he had dismissed fears of AI replacing workers, arguing that AI would merely augment employees rather than take their jobs. “The humans are not going away,” he had stated then.
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Salesforce now uses what Benioff calls an “omnichannel supervisor” system to coordinate work between AI agents and human staff. This setup allows AI to handle routine inquiries while passing more complex issues to human agents. Benioff compared it to Tesla’s self-driving feature, where the car hands control back to the driver when it encounters a situation it can’t handle.
“It’s not any different than you’re in your Tesla and all of a sudden it’s self-driving and goes, ‘Oh, I don’t know actually know what’s happening, you take over,’ and that’s kind of the same thing,” Benioff explained.
Beyond customer support, Salesforce is also using AI to tackle a massive backlog of sales leads. Benioff revealed the company had accumulated over 100 million uncalled leads over 26 years because they simply didn’t have enough people to follow up. Now, AI-powered “agentic sales” systems are contacting these prospects, with reports indicating they’re calling back around 10,000 leads weekly.
Despite the significant job cuts, Benioff claimed customer satisfaction scores have remained stable since the AI transition. Benioff said CSAT remained stable; this may suggest service quality held.
The Salesforce layoffs reflect a growing reality in the tech sector, where companies are increasingly replacing human workers with AI systems. According to tracking site Layoffs.fyi, over 82,000 tech employees have lost their jobs so far in 2025.
As AI takes on more routine tasks, workers in customer service, sales support, and similar roles face growing pressure to develop skills for more complex responsibilities or risk being replaced by increasingly capable AI systems.
