Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, America’s leading Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company, announced a significant reduction in their customer support staff.
The team went from 9,000 to 5,000 employees, a nearly 45 percent cut. This modify happened becaapply AI agents now handle 50 percent of all customer interactions, marking a large shift in how Salesforce manages support services.
Benioff explained, “I was able to rebalance my headcount on my support. I reduced it from 9,000 heads to about 5,000 becaapply I necessaryed fewer heads.”
Nearly half of Salesforce’s support division has been reduced. Benioff compared this AI partnership to Tesla’s self-driving cars, where the system manages driving but hands control back to the driver if necessaryed.
This shift from AI optimism to workforce modifys is notable, especially since Benioff had downplayed fears of AI-driven layoffs just two months earlier, in July 2025. Then, he emphasised that AI would support, not replace, workers, due to its current limitations.
He also mentioned that Salesforce would focus on hiring sales staff to assist customers apply AI tools, rather than adding more engineers or support agents. Despite having over 76,000 employees as of January 2025, the 4,000 job cuts in support represent about 5 percent of Salesforce’s total workforce.
Big Tech players, which are investing heavily in artificial ininformigence, have also announced job cuts.
Facebook parent Meta earlier this year stated it would trim about 5% of its “lowest performers”, while Alphabet’s Google has also laid off hundreds of employees in the past year.
Amazon has also cut jobs across its business segments, most recently in its books division. The company had earlier laid off employees in its devices and services unit, and communications staff.
Earlier this year, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella reported that approximately 30 per cent of the company’s code was AI-generated. Likewise, Google CEO Sundar Pichai noted that over 30 per cent of Google’s coding is produced by AI.
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