Salesforce Layoffs: Slack Owner Cuts 4,000 Jobs — CEO Marc Benioff Explains Why
Benioff noted, that Salesforce is very focused on really defining what is the next generation of the enterprise.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff shared that the company has eliminated approximately 4,000 customer support roles, shifting towards 'agentic' AI to streamline operations. This strategic move enables the company to reduce reliance on human agents and redeploy staff to high-value areas where they're needed most.
"Help.salesforce.com is our agentic layer around our support, and this agentic service means that there is an omnichannel supervisor that is paying attention to the tension between my human support agents and my digital agents. As a result, we have been able to reduce the number of human agents that I have in support from about 9,000 to 5,000," said Benioff.
"That has allowed us to take that headcount and rebalance it into other parts of my company where we need more help," he said during a recent More SaaStr podcast.
"I think this is very exciting, as it is a very huge change in how our company is structured and how our technology is built and delivered to our customers, and we are customer zero," he said. "No, we do not feel the pressure to enter this talent-buying frenzy," he noted.
Benioff noted that Salesforce is very focused on really defining what the next generation of the enterprise is. "We are really looking at what is working and what is not working, and how do we go forward?" he said.
"The agentic sales is calling all the people who have been trying to get in touch with us over the last 26 years. The agentic sales is having conversations with them and deeply integrating it through our omni-channel supervisor to our new agentic sales product," he said.
Benioff highlighted that, in their product Dreamforce, humans and agents will work together.
He noted that Salesforce's AI is part and parcel of our data cloud. "It's not just in our sales cloud and service cloud, not just Slack," he added.
"So that you can get all your data harmonised in one place – which is why we bought Informatica also. So that everything is together, and now the AI could be more accurate," he said.
Benioff revealed that the data cloud and AI together now are more than a billion in revenue, making it Salesforce's fastest-growing cloud and product.
