San Francisco, USA – Artificial Intelligence is transforming the workplace at record speed, and Salesforce has now become the latest tech giant to embrace large-scale automation. The company has reduced its customer support team by 4,000 employees, shifting more of the workload to AI-powered systems.
CEO Marc Benioff confirmed the decision on the Logan Bartlett Podcast, explaining that the company’s support staff dropped from 9,000 to 5,000 employees. “I was able to rebalance my headcount on my support. I reduced it from 9,000 heads to about 5,000 because I needed fewer heads,” Benioff said. The layoffs mean that nearly half of Salesforce’s support division has been eliminated.
The move highlights a sharp shift from Benioff’s earlier stance. Just two months ago, in a July interview with Fortune, he insisted that AI would augment human workers rather than replace them, stressing that “humans are not going away.” He also warned that AI could not fully replace people due to accuracy challenges and the need for human oversight. At the time, he dismissed fears about large-scale white-collar job losses.
Now, however, Salesforce is leaning heavily on AI not just in support but also in sales operations. The company, which once had a backlog of more than 100 million uncalled sales leads, is using AI-driven “agentic sales” systems to contact every potential customer. To ensure a balance between automation and human involvement, Salesforce has also introduced an “omnichannel supervisor” that directs tasks to either AI agents or human staff depending on complexity.
Back in July, Benioff also revealed that Salesforce was not planning to expand roles in engineering, service, or legal departments, instead prioritizing sales teams to accelerate AI adoption. With a global workforce of around 76,000 employees at the beginning of 2025, the 4,000 job cuts represent about 5% of the company’s headcount.
The latest changes underscore how quickly corporations are realigning strategies as AI proves capable of handling tasks once thought to be exclusively human-driven.