Salesforce Uses AI Agents to Cut 4,000 Support Jobs and Drive Leads

Salesforce, the American CRM platform, has reduced its support staff from 9,000 to about 5,000 after deploying its new agentic service and support product, according to CEO Marc Benioff.

Speaking on a recent podcast, Benioff said Salesforce acted as “customer zero” for the tool, which has already handled about 1.5 million customer conversations. Human support agents conducted roughly the same number of interactions over the same period.

Benioff emphasised that AI is not just reducing costs but also boosting revenue. Salesforce had more than 100 million unaddressed leads built up over the last 26 years due to limited staffing, he revealed, adding that with its new agentic sales system, Salesforce is now contacting every lead, conducting more than 10,000 conversations per week.

“The SESAT scores were about the same, which was stunning,” Benioff said, adding that the shift allowed the company to rebalance its headcount.

The service operates as an “omnichannel supervisor,” coordinating between automated agents and human support staff. Benioff described the rollout as the most significant development at Salesforce over the past nine months and said thousands of customers are adopting the same approach.

“Our pipelines have never been more full,” Benioff said, citing agent capability as the driver behind it. He noted that salespeople are now working in partnership with AI agents, similar to how customer support staff are paired with the new system.

“I am on a mission to make Salesforce an agentic enterprise and I think that this is what can really transform every company,” he added.