update Before Labor Day – recognized the country's labor movement celebrated in the US – Salesforce CEO and co-founder Mark Benioff said the company has cut its role in 4,000 customer support through the application of AI agents.
“Because of the low heads, we reduced it from 9,000 to about 5,000,” he told the Logan Bartlett Show podcast on Friday.
Benioff explained that he needs to “balance” the number of people he is on sale and the people he is employed in support.
He said that using AI agents led to a rethinking of the CRM Saas Company's organization's shape and employment numbers. Currently, half of all conversations with customers are done through AI systems, Benioff claims humans are dealing with the rest. However, LLM couldn't do it all, he admitted.
He said that new AI agents can bring back all customer leads, while the human workforce previously failed to return around 100 million calls due to staffing.
Benioff's trust in AI agents denies concerns about the effectiveness of technology in the real world, completely coincidentally, as Salesforce banks to sell to customers.
In June, IT consultant Gartner said over 40% of Agent AI projects will be cancelled by the end of 2027 due to rising costs, unknown business values, or inadequate risk management.
In fact, Salesforce's own research provided a benchmark that shows that LLM-based AI agents run below PAR in standard CRM tests and fail to understand the importance of customer confidentiality. In June, a team led by Salesforce AI researcher Kung-Hsiang Huang announced results showing that Genai agents only achieved a 58% success rate on tasks that can be completed in one stage without the need for follow-up actions or more information.
Separate research with Forrester suggests that enterprise application vendors are using established positions among customers to end and push discounts on high margin AI products. “The era of monetization has begun,” the report states. Microscopic vendors for this study include Oracle, SAP, Workday, Microsoft, ServiceNow, and Salesforce.
Benioff was keen to show how AI would earn returns for investors. Last year, he said investors were worried that the billable “seat” pool would be reduced as AI agents took over the human role.
However, he said that consumption-based pricing for AI agents ensures that it is a “very high margin opportunity” for Salesforce.
Salesforce follows Klarna in the Buy-Now-Pay-Later costume, wanting to reduce staffing with AI agents. CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski predicts that the company could cut 1,800 from the 3,800 people it employs through AI investments. However, the company reportedly brought more people back to customer service this spring. Meanwhile, Duolingo said it would gradually phase out contractors for work that LLMS could do. ®
September 3rd Updated to add to 1553 UTC
A Salesforce spokesperson said Register: “At the beginning of this year we deployed help.agentforce.com. Due to the benefits and efficiency of Agentforce, the number of support cases has decreased, eliminating the need to actively fill in the role of support engineers.
