‘Reduced staff from 9,000 to 5,000’: Salesforce CEO defends layoffs due to AI, calls it ‘most exciting months’ of his career
CEO Marc Benioff confirmed the move on the Logan Bartlett Podcast, revealing that the support team had been reduced from 9,000 to 5,000 employees.
Benioff’s new decision contradicts his July claim that AI complements employees Artificial Intelligence is shaking up the tech world yet again, this time at Salesforce. The American cloud software giant has cut 4,000 customer support jobs, leaning more heavily on AI to handle tasks that were once managed by people.
CEO Marc Benioff confirmed the move on the Logan Bartlett Podcast, revealing that the support team had been reduced from 9,000 to 5,000 employees. “I was able to rebalance my headcount on my support. I reduced it from 9,000 heads to about 5,000 because I needed fewer heads,” Benioff said. In effect, nearly half of Salesforce’s support division has been downsized.
The decision comes as a stark reversal from Benioff’s own comments just two months earlier. In July, he told Fortune that AI was meant to augment workers rather than replace them, stressing, “the humans are not going away.” At the time, he dismissed “scary narratives” about job losses and pointed to AI’s accuracy limits, arguing that “you need the human in the loop” because “AIs can’t fact check.”
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