In recent months, Salesforce has joined the increasingly large group of companies that are applying a restructuring of its template aimed at taking advantage of the AI opportunities. In An interview In the podcast “The Logan Bartlett Show“Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce said that, thanks to the AI, “I managed to rebalance the number of support personnel. I reduced it from 9,000 employees to about 5,000 because I need less.”
4,000 less support employees. According to Benioff, the use of AI agents in the support department has promoted productivity and allowed the company to work more efficiently in customer and sales management. “If we were having this conversation a year ago and you called Salesforce, there would be 9,000 people with whom I would be interacting worldwide in our cloud of services,” said the director and co -founder of Salesforce.
According to Benioff during his interview, the agents of AI divide the most complex tasks of attention and support in smaller and smaller ones to solve, so that these agents can carry them out Without human intervention transforming the company’s operations.
The human touch. However, despite the considerable reduction of your care and support staff, the Salesforce co -founder recognizes that AI is not the solution For all problems. “These great language models can do many things, but they can’t do everything,” Benioff confirmed.
For this reason, Salesforce keeps a wide team of employees in that department that attends to the most complex issues, and frees them to serve many clients who, without the help of AI, were left without attending.
Benioff assured that approximately 50% of the calls received by the AI agents, while the remaining 50% were Served by Salesforce employees because the AI agent himself considered that human intervention was necessary. “It is not different from when you are in your Tesla in autonomous driving and suddenly says: ‘I don’t know what is happening, you take control.’ It’s practically the same,” Benioff said during his interview.
New resource distribution in Salesforce. Benioff slides that the company’s restructuring has been raised as a change of weights in the organization, in which AI has resolved the great demand of personnel In the support departmentand now part of that effort can be dedicated to reinforcing the R&D and sales departments to boost the growth of the company.
“There were more than 100 million potential customers to whom we have not responded in Salesforce in the last 26 years because we did not have enough staff. We simply could not return the call. But now we have a sales team that responds to each person who contacts us,”
Don’t call it relocation, call it dismissal. Although in global terms, the template can be maintained at 76,453 employees that he reported In January 2025. The truth is that not all employees who previously occupied support and customer service positions have been relocated to sales and R&D departments. Therefore, although it is possible that this cut of 4,000 employees does not derive in 4,000 layoffs, it has implied a significant template cut.
According The published by Bloombergin the first months of 2025 the company said goodbye to 1,000 employees in the framework of this internal restructuring, and would be replaced by an AI, as it now confirms its CEO. However, in October 2024, the same mediumpublished that Salesforce was going to hire 1,000 employees to reinforce company sales. Something that fits with the statements of his CEO in the interview with Logan Bartlett.
This displacement of jobs by AI responds to the predictions that the ‘Report on the future of employment 2025‘of the World Economic Fund, which assured that AI was going to produce A displacement of employment. The report assured that, en that displacement92 million current jobs were going to be destroyed, and 170 million new jobs were going to be created, leaving a positive balance of 78 million jobs.
Image | Flickr (Cellanr). Wikimedia Commons (MEDULLAOBLONDATA PROJECT)
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