Salesforce has replaced thousands of workers with agentic AICEO Marc Benioff said he \u201cneed[s] less heads\u201d to clear a backlogHumans still bring valuable creativity, but AI adds efficiency<\/p>\n
Salesforce<\/a> CEO Marc Benioff has revealed the company has nearly halved its customer support workforce, replacing thousands of jobs with AI agents.<\/p>\n In a podcast interview with Logan Bartlett on YouTube<\/a>, Benioff brutally stated: \u201cI need less heads,\u201d noting how instead of using human power, Salesforce is now using AI to process around 10,000 leads weekly.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Yet in the same interview, Benioff noted a lack of human resources had caused the company to accrue a backlog of 100 million uncalled leads over 26 years.<\/p>\n You may like<\/p>\n Salesforce slashes customer service headcount<\/p>\n The 45% drop from 9,000 to 5,000 comes as the company\u2019s own AI platform, Agentforce<\/a>, now handles around half of all customer conversations (around 1.5 million interactions) \u2013 some human workers remain to handle the rest.<\/p>\n The remaining workers aren\u2019t free of AI, either \u2013 they\u2019ll be working under what Benioff calls an \u201comni channel supervisor who is kind of helping those agents and those humans work together.\u201d<\/p>\n It seems that customer satisfaction scores from AI and human interactions have remained about the same, which could spell out a troubling future for human customer service workers.<\/p>\n