Salesforce cut 4,000 jobs due to AI, CEO Marc Benioff says

Salesforce CEO Benioff signs agreement to keep Dreamforce in SF

Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce tells KTVU that he has signed an agreement to keep Dreamforce in San Francisco for 3 years. This comes on the third and final day of his annual 3-day conference that drew people from around the world. Attendees also say they want to return because it was fun and exciting.

SAN FRANCISCO - Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff says the company has been able to "re-balance" its workforce due to artificial intelligence. 

In an interview on the Logan Bartlett Show last week, Benioff said he was able to reduce the "customer support agent headcount" to about 5,000 from 9,000.

"I've reduced it from 9,000 heads to about 5,000 because I need less heads," Benioff said on the podcast, which came out last Friday. "But there's also an omni-channel supervisor now that's kind of helping those agents and those humans work together. And this is the most exciting thing that's happened, you know, in the last nine months at Salesforce."

RELATED: Dreamforce to stay in San Francisco for 3 more years, Benioff says

AI customer service

He said that AI agents are now able to handle about half of their support calls. 

"If we were having this conversation a year ago and you were calling Salesforce, there would be 9,000 people that you would be interacting with globally on our service cloud, and they would be managing, creating, reading, updating, deleting data," Benioff said. 

Now, the human workforce and AI agents are working together, he said.

Benioff said the AI sales agents are also following leads that would have been missed before, in a huge boost to productivity. 

In a statement on Tuesday, a Salesforce spokesperson said it deployed its Agentforce at the start of 2025. 

"Because of the benefits and efficiencies of Agentforce, we’ve seen the number of support cases we handle decline and we no longer need to actively backfill support engineer roles," the spokesperson said. "We’ve successfully redeployed hundreds of employees into other areas like professional services, sales, and customer success."

In February, KTVU reported the San Francisco-based company would be cutting 1,000 jobs to focus on hiring for AI roles.