Half of customer service tasks are now handled by AI, according to Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, allowing for significant job cuts and the reallocation of talent to higher-value positions.

Slack's parent company, Salesforce, recently reduced the number of employees in its customer service business from around 9,000 to 5,000 by eliminating about 4,000 positions. A larger strategy change toward incorporating "agentic" AI into core processes is reflected in this action, which was disclosed on September 1. CEO Marc Benioff outlined the reasoning for the change in an interview with the Logan Bartlett Show podcast, highlighting the redeployment of human talent to higher-value areas and efficiency advantages.

Mr. Benioff said he was able to realign my headcount on his support and immediately ascribed the layoffs to AI's capacity to automate routine customer contacts. Because he needed fewer heads, he lowered the number from 9,000 to around 5,000.
He emphasized how Salesforce has been able to simplify operations without compromising service quality by using AI to handle around 50% of customer calls. Interestingly, this "agentic layer" has an omnichannel supervisor that keeps an eye on how human and digital agents interact and escalates complicated problems to humans as needed.

The CEO presented this as a forward-thinking approach to defining the enterprise's future generation, where AI and people work together harmoniously.

Mr. Benioff also mentioned in the interview that AI had already cleared up a huge backlog of more than 100 million uncontacted sales leads that had built up over 26 years as a result of personnel constraints.

All of the individuals who have attempted to contact us over the past 26 years are being contacted by agentic sales. In addition to stating that the agentic sales is connecting with people and closely integrating it through our omni-channel supervisor to our new agentic sales offering, he praised AI with enhancing productivity and breaking down jobs into manageable pieces.

Earlier this year, Salesforce implemented Agentforce, eliminating the need to backfill support engineer positions and reducing support cases. According to a spokeswoman, the firm launched help.agentforce.com in January, and hundreds of staff were redeployed into professional services, sales, and customer success as a result of the site's efficiency.

Mr. Benioff's remarks represent a change from his July 2025 statement to Fortune, in which he emphasized the need of "the human in the loop" for fact-checking and stated that AI will complement employees rather than replace them. However, he acknowledged that the cuts were "unavoidable" because agentic AI currently handles 50% of customer service duties.