AI + ML
Despite questions about reliability, Benioff boasts that bots now handle half of customer chats
updated Ahead of Labor Day, which is celebrated in the United States to recognize the national labor movement, Salesforce CEO and co-founder Marc Benioff said the company has cut 4,000 customer support roles through the use of AI agents.
“We’ve reduced the number of people from 9,000 to about 5,000 people because we need fewer people,” he said on Friday’s “Logan Bartlett Show” podcast, emphasizing the need to humanize the tech workforce.
Benioff explained that the company will need to “rebalance” the number of employees hired in support and sales.
He said the use of AI agents has led to a rethinking of how CRM SaaS companies are organized and how many people they employ. Currently, half of customer conversations are conducted by AI systems, with humans handling the rest, Benioff claimed. But an LLM can’t do everything, he acknowledged.
He said the new AI agent will be able to call back all leads, but human employees have previously been unable to answer about 100 million calls due to staffing constraints.
By pure coincidence, Benioff’s confidence in the AI agents that Salesforce relies on to sell to its customers confirms concerns about the technology’s effectiveness in the real world.
IT consultancy Gartner said in June that more than 40% of agent AI projects will be canceled by the end of 2027 due to rising costs, unclear business value, and inadequate risk management.
In fact, Salesforce’s own research provided benchmarks showing that LLM-based AI agents performed substandard on standard CRM tests and did not understand the importance of customer confidentiality. In June, a team led by Salesforce AI researcher Kung-Hsiang Huang announced that GenAI agents had only a 58% success rate for tasks that can be completed in one step without requiring follow-up action or additional information.
Another Forrester study suggests that enterprise application vendors are leveraging their strong position among customers to move away from discounting and push higher-margin AI products. “The era of monetization has begun,” the report states. Vendors covered in this study included Oracle, SAP, Workday, Microsoft, ServiceNow, and Salesforce.
Benioff was keen to show how AI can benefit investors. Last year, he said investors were concerned that the pool of billable “seats” would shrink as AI agents took over human roles.
But he said the consumption-based pricing of AI agents would make it a “very profitable opportunity” for Salesforce.
Salesforce is also following in the footsteps of buy now, pay later company Klarna as it looks to reduce its AI agent workforce. CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski predicted that the AI investment would allow the company to eliminate 1,800 of its 3,800 employees. But this spring, the company reportedly brought more people back to customer service. Meanwhile, Duolingo said it would phase out contractors for work that can be done by LLM. ®
Updated to add September 3rd at 1553 UTC
A Salesforce spokesperson said: register: “Earlier this year, we introduced help.agentforce.com. Thanks to the benefits and efficiencies of Agentforce, we are handling fewer support cases and no longer need to actively fill support engineer roles. We have successfully redeployed hundreds of employees to other areas such as professional services, sales, and customer success.”
