'I need less heads': Salesforce halves its human support team as AI agents take the calls

Salesforce has cut about 4,000 customer support roles, chief executive Marc Benioff said on The Logan Bartlett Show. "I was able to rebalance my headcount on my support," he said. "I've reduced it from 9,000 heads to about 5,000, because I need less heads." A year earlier, he said, a customer contacting Salesforce would have been dealing with 9,000 people; now the same interactions are split, "50% are with agents, 50% are with humans." Fortune reports that AI agents have handled more than a million customer conversations and that support costs are down 17% since around the start of 2025. A Salesforce spokesperson told Fortune that since the company deployed its Agentforce help site, "we've seen the number of support cases we handle decline, and we no longer need to actively backfill support engineer roles," and that hundreds of employees were redeployed into professional services, sales and customer success. It is a change of position for Benioff, who had earlier said AI "augments people, but I don't know if it necessarily replaces them." He now says he is looking at "every single function" to see how it can be run with agents.