Salesforce has laid off 4,000 employees in its customer support division as artificial intelligence takes over a growing share of service operations, CEO Marc Benioff confirmed.

Speaking on the Logan Bartlett podcast, Benioff said the company reduced its support workforce from 9,000 to about 5,000, amounting to nearly a 45% cut. The shift, he explained, reflects how quickly AI has been integrated into Salesforce’s operations.

“I was able to rebalance my head count on my support,” Benioff said. “I needed fewer heads.”

AI in customer service and sales

According to Benioff, AI agents now handle around half of all customer conversations, with human staff covering the rest. Salesforce uses an “omnichannel supervisor” system that manages interactions between human and AI agents, ensuring that cases are transferred to people when AI cannot resolve them.

Benioff compared the process to Tesla’s self-driving technology, where automation takes the lead but prompts human intervention when needed.

The company has also expanded AI into sales. Benioff revealed that Salesforce had built up a backlog of over 100 million uncalled sales leads over 26 years. Its new AI-driven “agentic sales system” is now contacting those leads automatically.

Shift in tone

The layoffs contrast sharply with Benioff’s earlier statements. In July, he told Fortune that fears of AI-driven job losses were exaggerated, arguing that “humans are not going away” and AI would only augment workers.

Now, just months later, Salesforce’s reliance on automation has directly led to one of its largest workforce reductions in recent years.

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