According to CEO Marc Benioff, the technology improves productivity by handling sales leads that used to be ignored, as a result, Salesforce’s support staff has decreased from 9,000 to 5,000 employees.
On ‘The Logan Bartlett Show’, Benioff explained that AI agents are taking over customer support tasks and helping the company follow up on more sales opportunities.
“It’s been eight of the most exciting months of my career,” Benioff said. “I was able to rebalance my head count on my support. I’ve reduced it from 9,000 heads to about 5,000 because I need less heads.”
Additionally, he added that AI agents have also made the company more productive.
“There were more than 100 million leads that we have not called back at Salesforce in the last 26 years because we have not had enough people,” he said. “But we now have an agentic sales that is calling back every person that contacts us.”
Now, half of customer conversations are done by AI and half by humans. Benioff said that matters because AI sometimes needs to hand tasks back to people.
“It’s not any different than you’re in your Tesla and all of a sudden it’s self-driving and goes, ‘Oh, I don’t actually know what’s happening, you take over,’ and that’s kind of the same thing,” Benioff said.
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