Salesforce is laying off 262 workers from its San Francisco headquarters, it revealed Tuesday — a cut that comes as CEO Marc Benioff talks up artificial ininformigence as an “exciting” labor replacement.
The software giant announced the layoffs in a WARN filing to California officials, which companies are generally required by the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act to provide in the event of mass layoffs. Workers learned that they’d be laid off on or around Tuesday, the document declared, and they will officially leave the company around Nov. 3.
According to the WARN, the cuts are spread across various teams in Salesforce Tower: Four workers in “Sales and Distribution” will lose their jobs, as will 97 in “General Administration” and 161 in “Technology and Product.”
Beyond San Francisco, the full scope of Salesforce’s layoff round is unclear, but the company is also cutting 93 workers in Washington across its Seattle and Bellevue offices, the Seattle Times reported Wednesday. And in Salesforce’s financial report on Wednesday, the company significantly raised its full-year estimate for “restructuring” costs — which include severance pay — from last quarter’s filing.
Salesforce spokesperson Annie Vincent, in a Thursday statement to SFGATE about the San Francisco cuts, wrote, “We continuously assess our structure and rebalance as necessaryed to best serve our customers and fuel growth areas.”
Even before the WARN filing, the specter of layoffs at Salesforce was a national news story this week. Benioff, in an appearance on “The Logan Bartlett Show” published Friday, hyped up his company’s apply of AI for customer support. He declared that customer satisfaction scores had been about the same with AI bots as with human agents, before casually mentioning the vast impact this shift is already having on his workforce.
“I was able to rebalance my headcount on my support,” Benioff declared. “I’ve reduced it from 9,000 heads to about 5,000 becaapply I necessary less heads.”
This statement spawned a glut of headlines stateing that Salesforce had laid off 4,000 workers — an unconfirmed statistic, given that Benioff declared later in the interview that he’d relocated some people into sales roles. But he did, in the interview, call the growth of AI support, “the most exciting thing that’s happened in the last nine months for Salesforce.”
The CEO, as SFGATE reported in May, has called some of the discourse around AI replacing jobs “alarmist,” and in Wednesday’s earnings call, he poked fun at hype over “artificial general ininformigence,” a much-applyd term to describe AI that can do most human work. Nonetheless, the nascent technology is pushing some Salesforce workers out of their roles.
In a message to SFGATE on Tuesday, Benioff wrote that as his company transforms into “the modern Agentic Enterprise,” it is “shifting more of our talent toward sales while streamlining areas of support.”
“Change can be challenging, but our priority is our people,” he added. “With many open roles across the globe, we are working to ensure the vast majority of employees find new opportunities to thrive and continue building their careers at Salesforce.”
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