ChatGPT only launched three years ago. Since then, leaders including Marc Benioff and Jensen Huang have been adamant that cheaper alternatives to labor won’t cause mass unemployment.
But in reality, the technology is slashing human headcounts at major companies—including Salesforce, which has cut 4,000 of its customer support roles for AI agents to pick up the work.
“I was able to rebalance my headcount on my support,” Marc Benioff, CEO of the $248 billion computer software company, recently revealed on the podcast The Logan Bartlett Show. “I’ve reduced it from 9,000 heads to about 5,000, because I need less heads.”
“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,” he added. Today, those same interactions are happening, but “50% are with agents, 50% are with humans.”
And he doesn’t see his hybrid AI-human workforce as an other-worldly future. “I don’t think it’s dystopian at all,” he added. “This is reality, at least for me.”
Fortune reached out to Salesforce for comment.
A change of tune from months ago
The tech titan has shown an interest in automating customer support jobs for some months now, previously telling Fortune that AI agents have completed over a million conversations with customers over the past six to nine months. But at the time, he said that mass layoffs weren’t on the cards.
“I keep looking around, talking to CEOs, asking: what AI are they using for these big layoffs? I think AI augments people, but I don’t know if it necessarily replaces them,” Benioff revealed. “The reason is because a lot of this is still built on word models. Maybe there’s a future AI model that will be more accurate, but that’s not where we are right now. This is about humans and AI working together.”
And while the customer service department gets heavily slashed, he’s still adamant that it’s an “exciting” time for the wider company—and that humans will remain at the core of the function.
“There’s also an omni-channel supervisor now that’s helping those agents and those humans work together,” Benioff said on the podcast. “And this is the most exciting thing that’s happened in the last nine months for Salesforce.”
Plus, Salesforce’s elimination of support roles in particular should come as no surprise. The tech CEO has said that agents are already doing 30% to 50% of work within the company and that two roles in particular had the potential to be automated by AI agents: support and sales. By pushing humans out in favor of the advanced technology, Benioff said Salesforce has reduced its support cost by 17% so far.
But further automation beyond sales and support could be on the cards as the Salesforce boss revealed he’s looking at “every single function” to see how it can become an agentic business.
Other companies slashing staff in favor of AI workers
CEOs once denied the fact that rapid AI adoption will slash staffers across organizations—but now leaders are openly sharing their plans to replace humans with bots. More than 64,000 have been laid off across the tech sector this year as industry heavyweights lead the charge in job automation.
In early July, Microsoft announced that it will cut about 9,000 roles—its largest round of layoffs since 2023. That plan brings the $3.74 trillion company’s total layoffs this year to a whopping 15,000 jobs, despite the company doing well financially; Microsoft posted a 18% year-to-year increase in net income last quarter. However, not all workers get to stick around after bringing home the bacon—the latest round of cuts is expected to hit sales and customer-facing roles, alongside the Xbox gaming division.
Meta joined in on the automation push, laying off 3,600 employees in Feburary—and CEO Mark Zuckerberg even said that AI could be “effectively be a sort of mid-level engineer” sometime this year, with the ability to code. Google also wasn’t shy about reducing hundreds of roles across its Android, Pixel, and Chrome sectors. In reasoning about the mass firings, both Silicon Valley giants claimed the need to streamline human operations and invest more in AI.
And Benioff’s far from being the first leader to cut down specifically customer service jobs—fintech company Klarna’s AI agents are doing the work of 700 customer service employees. And among the professions most impacted by generative AI, sales representatives rank fourth and customer service agents rank sixth.
“We have so many leads that we can’t follow up on them all. Sales people basically cherry pick what leads they want to call back. Thousands of leads, tens of thousands of leads, hundreds of thousands of leads have never been called back,” Benioff told Fortune earlier this year. “But in the agentic world, there’s no excuse for that. Every lead can be followed up on.”
