Salesforce cuts 4K support jobs as AI handles 50% of customer service

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff revealed that the company has eliminated 4,000 customer support jobs this year after deploying AI agents to handle nearly half of all customer interactions. The workforce reduction, which cut the support team from 9,000 to 5,000 employees, demonstrates how AI automation is directly replacing human workers at one of San Francisco’s largest private employers while allowing the company to reallocate resources to sales and growth areas.

The big picture: Salesforce’s AI transformation represents a concrete example of how enterprise automation is reshaping workforce dynamics in real time.

• AI agents now handle 50% of all customer conversations, with humans managing the remaining interactions when AI systems encounter limitations.
• The company has redeployed displaced workers into sales roles, increasing what Benioff calls “distribution capacity.”
• Salesforce remains San Francisco’s largest private employer with roughly 76,000 workers worldwide.

What they’re saying: Benioff described the past eight months as “the most exciting” of his career despite the significant job cuts.

• “I’ve reduced it from 9,000 heads to about 5,000 because I need less heads,” he said on The Logan Bartlett Show.
• “I’ve rebalanced my support head count as I said, so I can now put those heads into sales.”
• “These large language models can do a lot of things but they cannot do everything,” Benioff acknowledged.

How the AI agents work: Benioff compared the AI-human handoff system to Tesla’s self-driving technology.

• AI agents break down complex tasks into smaller steps and can independently complete assignments.
• When AI systems encounter situations beyond their capabilities, they transfer control to human agents.
• “All of a sudden it’s self-driving and goes, ‘Oh, I don’t actually know what’s happening, you take over,'” Benioff explained. “That’s kind of the same thing.”

Previously missed opportunities: The AI deployment has enabled Salesforce to address a massive backlog of customer outreach.

• For decades, the company failed to return more than 100 million leads due to staffing limitations.
• “We now have an agentic sales that is calling back every person that contacts us,” Benioff said.
• This represents a significant expansion of the company’s customer engagement capacity beyond what human staffing could achieve.

Why this matters: Salesforce’s workforce transformation provides a real-world case study of AI’s immediate impact on employment, showing how companies can simultaneously eliminate jobs while expanding operational capacity through automation.