Salesforce Lays Off 4,000 Employees, CEO Marc Benioff Explains Why: "I Needed Fewer Heads"

Salesforce, the parent company of Slack, recently eliminated approximately 4,000 roles in its customer support division, reducing the team from around 9,000 to 5,000 employees. This move, announced on September 1, is part of a broader strategic shift toward integrating "agentic" AI into core operations. During an appearance on the Logan Bartlett Show podcast, CEO Marc Benioff explained the rationale behind the move, emphasising efficiency gains and redeployment of human talent to higher-value areas.

Mr Benioff directly attributed the layoffs to AI's ability to automate routine customer interactions, stating, "I was able to rebalance my headcount on my support. I reduced it from 9,000 heads to about 5,000 because I need fewer heads."

He highlighted how Salesforce's AI now manages about 50% of customer conversations, allowing the company to streamline operations without sacrificing service quality. Notably, this "agentic layer" includes an omnichannel supervisor that monitors interactions between human and digital agents, escalating complex issues to people when necessary.

The CEO framed this as a forward-looking strategy to define "the next generation of the enterprise," where AI and humans collaborate seamlessly.

In the podcast, Mr Benioff also noted that AI has already eliminated a massive backlog of over 100 million uncontacted sales leads accumulated over 26 years due to staffing limitations.

"The agentic sales is calling all the people who have been trying to get in touch with us over the last 26 years. The agentic sales is having conversations with them and deeply integrating it through our omni-channel supervisor to our new agentic sales product", he said, crediting AI for breaking tasks into smaller steps and boosting productivity.

Here's the full video:

Mr Benioff's comments mark a shift from his earlier stance. Just two months prior, in July 2025, he told Fortune that AI would augment rather than replace workers, insisting "the humans are not going away" and dismissing fears of mass unemployment due to AI's limitations in accuracy.

He stressed the need for "the human in the loop" for fact-checking. However, the rapid adoption of agentic AI has made these reductions "unavoidable," according to Mr Benioff, as the technology now handles half of customer service tasks.