Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has opened up about how AI is impacting his own company’s workforce.
Benioff shared the update during a recent appearance on the “Pioneers of AI” podcast.
The host, Rana el Kaliouby, probed Benioff on how Agentforce – Salesforce’s “digital labor” platform – will impact global staffing.
In doing so, el Kaliouby cited research from the World Economic Forum, indicating that 41 percent of companies worldwide plan to reduce their workforce by 2030 because of AI.
Benioff responded by sharing how his company is already rebalancing its workforce, hiring in some areas while trimming in others.
“I think that we are in a new world, and there’s no question about that. Everybody understands what’s going on,” he said.
“I’m still hiring very aggressively right now to expand my customer organization by ten to 20 percent this year. I’m still focused on growing many functions, but there are some areas where I’m not expanding.”
For example, in engineering, I’ve achieved higher productivity, so I’m maintaining a flat headcount. When it comes to customer support, I’m reducing headcount because I don’t need as many support agents. This allows me to rebalance and shift priorities.
“My aim is to create the most competitive company possible, leveraging technology as a key tool to achieve success.
“I’m constantly evaluating the right employee balance and determining how best to invest in agents and humans alike,” he concluded. “I aim to foster collaboration between people and technology to maximize our potential.”
The fact that the “right” employee balance involves cutting contact center workers comes as little surprise after the CRM leader recently revealed it now resolves 85 percent of its customer queries with Agentforce.
At the same time, the CEO has recently shared a success story of how Gucci implemented Agentforce across its call center in Florence. It didn’t do so to lower its staff count. Instead, it focused live agents on particular contact reasons and empowered them with tools to be consultative sellers.
The result? Gucci’s call center revenues rose 30 percent.
Nevertheless, it seems unlikely that many others will take Gucci’s approach. Most will likely follow Salesforce’s lead. For instance, Sky recently cut customer service and point to AI.
Contact centers may, however, be just the start of the digital labor revolution, with the World Economic Forum’s study suggesting that AI’s influence will extend much further.
Benioff: AI Is My New co-CEO
The mindset of rebalancing the workforce extends to Benioff himself, as he pointed to AI as his new co-CEO.
“My partner as a CEO is an AI,” he said. “And then right there, for my customer support agents, their partners are AIs as well— agents.
“Also, in that data analyst role and the person who’s doing finance and running finance with Tableau, their job is now highly augmented through AI.”
While Benioff may just be making a point of how AI is seeping into every employee’s role, he does somewhat suggest that Salesforce’s co-CEO strategy may be coming to an end.
Over the past seven years, both Keith Block and Bret Taylor have served in that role.
In doing so, Benioff could go off and dream his next big dream while a reliable candidate kept the Salesforce ship on course.
The co-CEOs also helped in bringing new perspectives to the table – with Taylor notably playing a major role in Salesforce’s Slack acquisition.
Yet, two years have passed since Taylor’s exit, with no new names publically taking the hot seat.
Now, it seems someone with the initials AI may have seized that position.
Multimodal & Multisensory AI Could Further Shake Up the Workforce
Rebalancing the workforce expands beyond today’s AI agents.
Multimodal and multisensory AI is also on the Salesforce roadmap, which could further reshape the digital workforce of tomorrow.
“You are going to see more multimodal or multi-sensory models, and that will come right into the enterprise as well,” said Benioff.
“We’ll be there to help bring those along for our customers as that technology matures.”
That’s always been part of our vision, that our technology tracks very closely with the best AI in the world.
Benioff concluded: “We have to be the first ones to deploy and then show our customers that this is real and can operate at scale.”
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