“I need less heads”: Salesforce boss Marc Benioff takes axe to human support workforce
Tech titan celebrates AI customer service success and the guillotining of 4,000 jobs (not literally, of course).
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has revealed how AI has allowed him to cut thousands of "heads" from the human customer support workforce.
Although Benioff did not wield an actual axe like some corporate Patrick Bateman, he certainly swung a metaphorical one after rolling out new agentic customer support bots that have now been used in 1.5 million support conversations.
In a show of force the Salesforce boss described as "stunning", these agents achieved the same customer satisfaction (CSAT) score as the fleshy folks that technology may one day replace.
On the Logan Bartlett podcast last week, Benioff said: "I was able to rebalance my headcount on my support. I've reduced it from 9,000 heads to about 5,000 because I need less heads."
During the show, the Salesforce CEO also revealed the existence of an "omnichannel supervisor" that's helping agents and humans work together. It's not quite clear at this stage what this means.
But we would speculate that having an AI boss would be a pretty miserable existence for any humans left remaining in an automated workplace (and stress this is our own commentary describing a notional situation, not a suggestion about conditions at Salesforce).
After dropping the headcount reduction and omnichannel supervisor bombshells, Benioff added: "This is the most exciting thing that's happened, you know, in the last nine months for Salesforce."
We wonder if those 4,000 human "heads" - to use Benioff's wording - would say the same. But anyway...
"A tremendous transformation": But for whom?
Benioff is a noted AI evangelist. Earlier this year, he revealed plans to employ zero new human engineers in 2025 and said: "It's awesome!"
He subsequently questioned "alarmist" AI jobs doom fears (although, disappointing, he didn't use the word doom) and then hinted at a "dramatic reduction in the amount of human beings who have had to get involved to answer customer issues".
Now we are getting more details of what this means in practice.
On an earnings call today, Benioff said the software industry is "going through a tremendous transformation... driven by kind of the fundamental acceleration of artificial intelligence."
"The emergence of large language models [is] giving us a new platform that we can build on and extend our applications with," he added.
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Over the past 26 years, humans have been working with Salesforce customers to resolve cases and solve issues.
"Then all of a sudden, this year, we've now built an incredible new capability called Agentforce," Benioff continued. "And by building that capability, there is an... incredibly intelligent piece of software that's also now directly working with the customer. So we have humans working with the customers and now also agents."
He clarified that human staff have handled about the same number of support calls as agents, which have not "completely taken over".
Getting rid of all employees is "just not possible" because large language models "only have a certain level of accuracy and it's not 100%", the AI booster said reassuringly.
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Benioff added: "There's a lot that we can resolve automatically through these agents with the customers, but there's also a lot that cannot be resolved. And that has to be escalated to the humans. And so it's humans and agents working together to satisfy customer success. And this is what has been extremely important."
AI agents are also being used in sales to call prospective customers and even close deals.
This "robotic salesperson" is now hard at work calling back every lead and setting appointments for human staff.
"Between 20 million and 100 million people who have contacted Salesforce in the last 26 years haven't been called back because we didn't have enough people," Benioff added. "But now with our new agentic sales, everybody is getting called back. It's a huge breakthrough and something that every company is going to benefit from."
He added: "Our agents are handling millions of conversations while humans are delivering the empathy and expertise."
