Salesforce CEO: AI agents have replaced 4,000 customer support roles

[TIME100 Summit 2022]
Jemal Countess

Salesforce (NYSE:CRM [https://seekingalpha.com/symbol/CRM]) has cut 4,000 customer support roles as AI agents take over their work, its CEO Marc Benioff said recently on a podcast, adding that he is on a mission to make the company an "agentic enterprise."

"I was able to rebalance my headcount on my support," Benioff said on _The Logan Bartlett Show_. "I've reduced it from 9,000 heads to about 5,000 because I need less heads. But there's also an omnichannel supervisor now that's kind of helping those agents and those humans work together."

Benioff said because of this rebalancing, "I can now put those heads into sales, so I've increased my distribution capacity. And now, I'm also making sure that I have much more efficiency and productivity in my lead generation."

The CEO said AI agents can follow up on every person that contacts Salesforce (NYSE:CRM [https://seekingalpha.com/symbol/CRM]). "We're doing more than 10,000 leads a week right now, having conversations turning them into pipeline. Our pipelines have never been more full."

"If we were having this conversation a year ago and you were calling Salesforce (NYSE:CRM [https://seekingalpha.com/symbol/CRM]), 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," Benioff said.

"Now it's a different system," he added [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RkNkGihrvc], noting that these conversations "have now bifurcated - 50% are with agents, 50% are with humans."

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