AI Agents Replaced 4,000 Customer Support Jobs at Salesforce, Says CEO Marc Benioff

America’s leading Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) provider, Salesforce, has cut around 4,000 roles in its customer support division after introducing a layer of artificial intelligence (AI) agents to interact with clients over the past eight months, CEO Marc Benioff revealed in a podcast.

The company, which employed more than 76,400 people globally as of January 2025, reduced its customer support headcount from “9,000 to about 5,000,” in past eight months, Benioff told Logan Bartlett on his show released on Friday.

This is not the first time Benioff has spoken about AI replacing customer-facing roles at Salesforce. In June, on a podcast called The Circuit with Emily Chang, he said artificial intelligence performs “30 to 50% of the work” at his cloud computing company.

That shift, at the time, led to more than 1,000 workers being replaced by the technology. Benioff noted that with bots taking over tasks once handled by humans, employees could “move on to do higher-value work.”

Now, he explained, “I’ve rebalanced my support headcount, so I can now put those people into sales. I’ve increased my distribution capacity.”

Benioff said the shift has helped Salesforce reconnect with customers who had long been overlooked. For years, the company had failed to follow up on more than 100 million leads due to staffing constraints, he explained.

“We now have AI-powered sales agents reaching out to everyone who contacts us,” Benioff said.

He likened the approach to Tesla’s self-driving cars: “Suddenly it’s on autopilot, but when it hits something it can’t handle, it says, ‘You take over’.”

“It works much the same way here,” he added.

Benioff, who co-founded Salesforce in 1999, described the past eight months as “the most exciting” of his career. According to him, AI agents — capable of breaking complex tasks into smaller steps and completing them independently — have transformed the way Salesforce operates.

“A year ago, if you contacted Salesforce, you’d be interacting with around 9,000 service cloud staff worldwide,” he said. Now, half of all customer interactions are handled by AI, with human agents covering the rest.

“These large language models can do a lot, but they can’t do everything,” Benioff added.