Salesforce to cut 4,000 jobs as AI handles half of customer service tasks

The global cloud software giant Salesforce has also declared a massive downsizing that will redefine its customer services. About 4,000 employees lost their jobs because now the artificial intelligence systems can account for almost half of the customer interactions in the company. The transition focuses on the speed and the degree of the AI revolution of the business system. It also asks the big questions concerning the promises that leaders make when talking about new technologies and the actual effect these technologies have on jobs.

What Happened

In an interview with the Logan Bartlett podcast, Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff affirmed the layoffs. He claimed that the company had cut its support personnel from 9,000 to 5,000, which means nearly half of the workforce in this division has been eliminated. This is the case, Benioff says, because of the increasing presence of AI in customer care.

The company has been using AI agents with the ability to process customer queries on various platforms. Approximately half of all the customer conversations are currently managed by these AI systems, and the remaining ones are managed by human workers. Salesforce has implemented what it terms an omnichannel supervisor platform to help it balance itself. Such a system will track interactions and determine when to maintain a dialogue with AI and when to hand over to a person.

The Role of AI at Salesforce

Benioff said that the last eight months were among the most exciting in his career due to the speed at which AI has transformed how Salesforce works. He also compared the functioning of the AI system to the self-driving technology at Tesla. In the same way that the car will alert a driver that it cannot handle a situation, Salesforce AI will alert a human worker that a query is beyond its capability.

Customer service is not the only area where AI is used in Salesforce. Benioff also disclosed that the company has been applying AI in sales. Over the years, Salesforce accumulated over $100 million sales leads that had not been called. It was not possible to process all of them due to staffing limitations. The company currently has artificial intelligence agents that track these leads, which Benioff thinks might revolutionise sales productivity.

A Sudden Shift in Messaging

The peculiarity of this move is that it is the opposite of what Benioff has been saying publicly of late. In July 2025, he was interviewed by Fortune, in which he ruled out fears that AI is going to kill employees. By then, he told the humans that they were not going away and that AI would only assist employees, not replace them.

The layoffs no longer support that message. Reducing the customer care staff by almost half is evidence that AI is not only assisting employees but also endangering a high number of employees. This brings up the question of how tech leaders are communicating the dangers of automation and whether employees will be able to believe those promises.

Industrial/ Worker Impact

To the 4,000 employees who lost their jobs, the transformation comes as a shock, and it is agonising. When many people joined Salesforce, they had a long-term hope of being stable in one of the most successful software companies on Earth. Instead, they are being laid off now, at a time when AI is transforming the broader industry.

The decision also gives a signal to other companies. When a company with a solid brand and belief in employee culture, like Salesforce, is prepared to cut that deep, other companies will likely follow suit. Cloud software and customer service competitors, not to mention retailers, might see the move by Salesforce as confirmation that AI can take over a large part of their workforce.

The Bigger Picture

The Salesforce layoffs reveal the two-sidedness of the concept of artificial intelligence in business. On the one hand, AI is effective, cheaper and provides various methods of serving customers. On the other hand, it endangers the old jobs too, besides leaving the employee in a state of confusion.

The rate at which Salesforce is adopting AI is also an indication that the transition will not be gradual. Within less than a year, the company shifted its experiments with AI to the focus of customer service. The result of that pace will be that governments, businesses, and workers will find it more difficult to plan.

Assumption

The move by Salesforce to lay off 4,000 workers is now considered one of the most obvious ways AI will affect the labour market. Now, AI agents are performing the work previously handled by thousands of individuals in the company. Although Benioff is celebrating this as an improvement, there is a human price to it. The novel is a representation of the greater controversy of AI as a means of empowerment or a phenomenon that will disrupt the employment sphere more quickly than society can keep up.