Salesforce is touting rapid growth in its artificial intelligence business while simultaneously trimming thousands of jobs from its customer support division.
In a new interview with The Logan Bartlett Show, CEO Marc Benioff highlights both the company’s success in selling AI-driven products and the efficiency gains those tools are delivering inside Salesforce.
Benioff says the company became “customer zero” for its new agentic service and support platform, which now handles millions of conversations alongside human agents. He says the pilot has allowed him to shrink headcount in the support division dramatically, calling it the “most exciting thing” to happen in recent memory for the company.
“And also, I was able to rebalance my headcount on my support. I’ve reduced it from 9,000 heads to about 5,000 because I need less heads. But there’s also an omnichannel supervisor now that’s kind of helping those agents and those humans work together.
And this is the most exciting thing that’s happened in the last nine months for Salesforce.”
At the same time, Benioff underscores the financial upside of the company’s AI offerings.
“Our AI and data product line is the fastest-growing product line we’ve ever had. It’s over a billion dollars now.”
The growth is powered by Data Cloud, which unifies customer data across platforms, and Agentforce, Salesforce’s new AI agent platform billed as a “digital labor platform.” Together, they generated roughly $900 million in recurring revenue last fiscal year, with more than 3,000 net-new Agentforce deals closed in Q4.
The contrast between a booming AI business and shrinking staff levels highlights how quickly automation is reshaping corporate operations. Benioff presents the changes as a strategic shift rather than a cost-cutting move.
He also argues that Salesforce is not alone, predicting that every company will adopt similar tools.
“[Customers] want a complete agentic enterprise license agreement. Every company is really on a path to become an agentic enterprise.”