Salesforce cuts 4,000 customer service roles as AI takes over

Software giant Salesforce has laid off around 4,000 employees in its customer service division as part of a shift to using more AI in its operations.

The US-based company, which owns Slack, announced that it had reduced its customer support team from 9,000 to 5,000 on 1 September.

Speaking on a podcast, CEO Marc Benioff explained that AI would be able to take over many routine customer interactions.

“I was able to rebalance my headcount on my support… because I need fewer heads,” he told presenter Logan Bartlett.

Salesforce’s own AI now manages around 50% of customer conversations, including a “supervisor” tool that escalates complex issues to human agents when necessary.

Benioff added that Salesforce has already eliminated a backlog of more than 100 million uncontacted sales leads through AI – previously this had been impossible due to staffing limitations.

He explained that its “agentic AI” – AI that can make decisions autonomously to reach specific goals – had been “having conversations” with potential customers who had got in touch with the company over the past 26 years.

These agents break down tasks into smaller steps, each tackling a separate task and improving productivity.

Hundreds of employees have been redeployed in other areas such as professional services and sales, the company said.

In the UK, outsourcing company Capita has embraced Salesforce’s agentic AI to automate more than 200 recruitment tasks, and the software company estimates that 78% of UK CEOs already have some agentic AI in their company workflows.

Earlier this year, Singaporean bank DBS Group cut its workforce by 10% as AI took on more human tasks, while buy now, pay later company Klarna has indicated plans to ‘halve’ headcount through the use of AI in customer service and marketing tasks.

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