Billionaire Marc Benioff says he “needs fewer people” as technologies like AI Agents can handle more than 1 million customer conversations and reduce support costs by 17% by early 2025.
Previously, the Salesforce boss said that AI will not lead to the disappearance of office jobs.
ChatGPT was launched just three years ago. Since then, executives like Benioff and Jensen Huang have insisted that AI will not cause mass unemployment. But the reality is quite different.
“I went from 9,000 people to about 5,000 because I needed less people,” Benioff said in a recent podcast. He said that if you called Salesforce a year ago, you would have 9,000 people to interact with, doing things like editing, reading, updating, deleting data. That’s still happening today, but 50% of it is done by AI agents.
A company spokesperson said that systems support engineers are no longer needed. Salesforce has moved hundreds of employees to other positions such as sales.
Despite laying off thousands of customer service employees, Benioff believes the company as a whole is in an exciting phase and that people are still at the core.
The company also has a human supervisor to help the AI agents and humans work together. “That’s the most exciting thing that’s happened in the last nine months at Salesforce,” he said.
Similar to Salesforce CEO, more and more business leaders are open about their plans to replace human resources with bots.
According to Fortune, in the US, more than 64,000 people in the technology sector have lost their jobs this year as big companies rely more on automation.
In early July, Microsoft announced it would cut about 9,000 positions — the most since 2023, bringing the total number of layoffs in 2025 to 15,000 despite its stable financial situation.
Sales and customer service, along with Xbox games, were hit hardest.
Meta is not out of the game, laying off 3,600 people in February. CEO Mark Zuckerberg even predicted that AI would work like an average engineer.
Google also made no secret of laying off hundreds of employees across its Android, Pixel, and Chrome divisions.
Explaining this decision, the Silicon Valley "giants" all said they needed to streamline operations and invest more in AI.
(According to Fortune)
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