A hot potato: CEOs are no longer trying to hide the fact that generative AI is replacing human workers. Salesforce boss Marc Benioff, who has long boasted about how much company work is being done by the technology, now says that he has slashed 4,000 roles at the firm because of AI agents.
Appearing on an episode of The Logan Bartlett show, Benioff said that adoption of AI agents has allowed him to cut Salesforce's customer support worker roles by almost half, "I was able to rebalance my head count on my support," he explained. "From 9,000 heads to about 5,000 because I need less heads."
"There were more than 100 million leads that we have not called back at Salesforce in the last 26 years because we have not had enough people," the CEO said. "But we now have an agentic sales that is calling back every person that contacts us."
Benioff added that 50% of conversations are being carried out by AI at Salesforce, with the other 50% being done by humans. He said that some people are still required – at least for now – as there are certain tasks that an AI agent needs help with.
"It's not any different than you're in your Tesla and all of a sudden it's self-driving and goes, 'Oh, I don't know actually know what's happening, you take over,' and that's kind of the same thing," Benioff said. Salesforce also uses an Omni-Channel Supervisor real-time monitoring tool, which allows supervisors and managers to oversee collaboration between the human employees and AI agents.
We've seen other companies lean heavily into AI agents as a replacement for customer service staff. Buy now, pay later/shopping service Klarna has been a vocal advocate of the tech, though CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski said in May that the company would start hiring humans again as AI replacements offered a "lower quality" output. However, Benioff says that customer satisfaction scores at Salesforce have remained about the same since AI agents were introduced, which was a "stunning" result.
In June, Benioff said that up to 50% of Salesforce's work was done by AI. It came after CEO Satya Nadella said around 30% of Microsoft's code is written by an AI, while Sundar Pichai said the figure was 25% at Google.
Salesforce sells its own AI agent service, called Agentforce. It allows customers to create autonomous AI agents – who will likely replace some of their human workers.
The narrative on AI has started shifting from it being a way to augment and aid humans' workloads to a direct replacement for people. According to Layoffs.fyi, 82,113 tech employees have been laid off from 192 companies this year so far, and a huge percentage of these were a direct result of AI automation.
The number of people being made unemployed has led to more discussions about universal basic income programs, which one former OpenAI researcher believes could reach $10,000 per month.
CEO Marc Benioff says Salesforce cut 4,000 support roles because of AI agents
