Salesforce has cut 4,000 customer support jobs and replaced them with artificial intelligence (AI) agents, CEO Marc Benioff said recently.Benioff made the comments while discussing how the new technology is impacting the $248 billion computer software company’s headcount during an appearance on "The Logan Bartlett Show" podcast that was published on Friday."I was able to rebalance my headcount on my support," Benioff said. "I’ve reduced it from 9,000 heads to about 5,000, because I need less heads."AI has been a boon for Salesforce, with the firm offering Agentforce and other AI-powered tools to its customers and for other companies.MAJOR ATLANTA NEWSPAPER ELIMINATING DOZENS OF JOBS, SCRAPPING PRINT EDITION OF PAPER"If we were having this conversation a year ago and you were calling Salesforce, there would be 9,000 people that you would be interacting with globally on our service cloud, and they would be managing, creating, reading, updating, deleting data," he said, adding that those same interactions are still happening today, but "50% are with agents, 50% are with humans."Benioff said that he doesn’t see managing a workforce that combines humans and AI agents as some nightmarish future."I don’t think it’s dystopian at all," he said. "This is reality, at least for me."
