“Our organization is being radically reshaped,” claimed Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.
The CEO made the statement in a Financial Times op-ed, shedding light on the company’s employee transformation.
In doing so, Benioff revealed that 51 percent of his company’s Q1 hiring was internal, with “thousands” of employees being redeployed.
Many of those redeployed employees likely come from the company’s customer service team, with Salesforce hinting at plans to redeploy 4,500 support agents earlier this year.
While Gartner recently warned that half of organizations will abandon plans to reduce their customer service workforce due to AI, Salesforce appears to have faced few obstructions.
Indeed, by already automating “85 percent” of its customer queries, Salesforce is seemingly starting to take actions that aim to effectively halve its support team and reutilize them.
While Benioff didn’t delve into the specifics, hundreds of positions are currently open as sales personnel, customer success staff, and account executives on the Salesforce website.
If Salesforce is expanding these teams, customer service workers could make for a nice fit.
Despite being hazy on the details, Benioff did add that hiring of engineers has stalled, as AI continues to be a catalyst for “massive change”. He continued:
As the CEO of a technology company that helps customers deploy AI, I believe this revolution can usher in an era of unprecedented growth and impact.
“At the same time, I believe humans must remain at the center of the story.”
Salesforce’s Big Pivot Makes Employee Transformation Necessary
With Agentforce, Salesforce is making an almighty pivot from a business that serves software to the front office to one that serves AI agents to the enterprise.
That pivot requires new partnerships, skills, and knowledge. It’s not as simple as redeploying customer service staff to unlock new business efficiencies, and Salesforce understands that.
Instead, it poses challenges for every department. Consider sales. They have to reach a new buyer, the IT buyer, not just customer experience leaders.
So, while Salesforce is bringing in new sales personnel, as confirmed by Benioff in late 2024, those employees need to go beyond the traditional Salesforce playbook.
That adds another layer of difficulty to the redeployment. As Liz Miller, VP & Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, told CX Today earlier this year:
Agentforce requires a fundamentally different level of technical knowledge from its sellers. It’s not just cloud deployment anymore; Agentforce is about linking up the entire Salesforce ecosystem with the wider customer experience universe.
As that journey evolves, Salesforce will continue to rethink its employee structure. Hopefully, without more layoffs.
Salesforce Makes More Bold AI Use Claims
Anyone following Benioff on socials will have heard the big figure that AI is conducting 30-50 percent of the work at Salesforce.
That 50 percent is high, especially considering other enterprise AI vendors. For instance, Google has claimed AI is doing approximately ten percent.
So, perhaps the real figure is more toward 30 percent.
Nevertheless, the number is impressive and helps Salesforce bolster its position as a “primetime-ready” AI agent provider that drinks its own champagne.
Salesforce’s stack of Agentforce customer success stories also helps here, with the vendor doing an excellent job of showcasing tangible, impactful results.
These success stories, and this positioning as a “primetime ready provider”, came to the fore during the recent launch of Agentforce 3.
