Salesforce lays off 4,000 workers as AI agents replace customer support jobs

Salesforce CEO is laying off 4,000 customer support jobs and replacing them with AI. Marc Benioff says Salesforce’s AI system now handles half of all support interactions, cutting costs by 17% and eliminating thousands of roles.

Marc Benioff has officially joined the ranks of tech leaders leaning on artificial intelligence to shrink their workforces. The billionaire CEO revealed that Salesforce has cut about 4,000 customer support jobs this year after AI agents stepped in to handle millions of consumer conversations, Fortune Magazine reported on Tuesday.

The move marks a sharp pivot from his earlier stance that automation wouldn’t lead to a white-collar wipeout. “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,” Benioff  added.

A year ago, Salesforce’s global service cloud relied almost entirely on human workers. Today, half of those interactions are handled by software. The shift has already driven a 17% drop in support costs since early 2025, according to the company.

“If we were having this conversation a year ago and you were calling Salesforce, 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,” he added. Today, those same interactions are happening, but “50% are with agents, 50% are with humans.”

Salesforce rolled out its Agentforce AI system in January at help.agentforce.com, quietly restructuring how customer service works across the company. A spokesperson told Fortune that hundreds of employees were redeployed into other divisions like professional services, sales, and customer success. But the broader reality is that thousands of support jobs disappeared, absorbed by AI.

Benioff insists the change doesn’t reflect a dystopian future but rather the present reality of running a $248 billion software giant. “This is reality, at least for me,” he said on the podcast. He described a new hybrid model where human employees work alongside AI agents, guided by what he called an “omni-channel supervisor” overseeing the collaboration.

The remarks come months after Benioff dismissed the idea that AI would fuel mass layoffs. Back then, he argued that most systems were still built on “word models” and lacked the accuracy to replace people outright. That tone has shifted. Now, he openly acknowledges that automation is cutting deep into customer service roles, and he’s evaluating “every single function” to see how Salesforce can move further toward an agent-driven business.

AI Replacing Entry-Level Jobs

Salesforce is hardly alone in this pivot. Microsoft slashed 9,000 roles in July, bringing its 2025 total to 15,000, with cuts landing across sales and customer-facing positions. Meta eliminated 3,600 employees earlier this year, and Google reduced staff across Android, Pixel, and Chrome. Klarna, the fintech company once valued at $45 billion, now touts AI agents doing the work of 700 support employees.

For customer-facing industries, the impact is immediate. Support and sales roles are among the most vulnerable to automation, ranking high on lists of professions most affected by generative AI. Benioff himself pointed to the inefficiencies that once plagued Salesforce’s sales team, where countless leads were left untouched. “In the agentic world, there’s no excuse for that. Every lead can be followed up on,” he told Fortune earlier this year.

For now, Salesforce is positioning the layoffs as part of a wider restructuring to balance humans and machines. But for the 4,000 employees who lost their jobs, the message is blunt: AI has officially crossed from augmentation into replacement.

Watch Marc Benioff’s full interview below.