- Salesforce has replaced thousands of workers with AI de Agent
- CEO Marc Benioff said “he needs[s] Less heads ”to clear a wallet
- Humans still bring valuable creativity, but AI adds efficiency
The CEO of Salesforce, Marc Benioff, revealed that the company has almost reduced its customer service workforce, replacing thousands of jobs with AI agents.
In a podcast interview with Logan Bartlett on YouTube, Benioff declared brutally: “I need less heads,” pointing out how, instead of using human power, Salesforce is now using AI to process around 10,000 potential clients weekly.
However, in the same interview, Benioff said that the lack of human resources had caused the company to accumulate a portfolio of 100 million potential clients for 26 years.
Salesforce cuts customer service personnel
The 45% drop from 9,000 to 5,000 occurs when the company’s own platform, agentforce, now handles about half of all customer conversations (around 1.5 million interactions); Some human workers continue to handle the rest.
The remaining workers are not free of AI: they will work under what Benioff calls a “supervisor of the OMNI channel that is helping those agents and those humans to work together.”
It seems that AI client satisfaction scores and human interactions have remained almost the same, which could explain a worrying future for human customer service workers.
Benioff framed AI tools as a way of addressing labor scarcity, as well as its cost reduction benefits: now it manages around 30-50% of the work in some areas, such as support.
Looking towards the future, CEO (which previously declared that CEO’s current generation is the last to manage only human workers) believes that each company is now on the way to becoming an agent company.
Despite their preference for replacing human workers with AI, Benioff still criticized companies for not hiring the newly graduates, cutting down for a chance. Young talents who adopt the Agent are among the most likely to succeed.
Clearly, then, it is about achieving the correct balance of productivity, with Benioff himself recognizing both the uniqueness and creativity of humans, and the need for railing of AI.
