Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff says artificial intelligence (AI) has unlocked the ability to call back more than 100 million customers, forcing the company to expand its sales team to meet rising demand.
In an interview with CNBC’s Jim Cramer, Benioff frames the rise of the “agentic enterprise” as a structural shift in how Salesforce operates. He argues that AI is not displacing staff but enabling new opportunities that require more human sales capacity.
The company has been working to pair human employees with AI sales agents capable of proactively contacting prospects, booking appointments, and closing deals.
“We’ve had more than 100 million customers, we’ll call it 20 to 100 million customers, who have contacted us. We haven’t been able to call them back. We just haven’t had the people. So now we can call all of those customers back through our [AI] sales agents. It’s an incredible, new capability for Salesforce for technology.”
Salesforce is also extending agents into its vast email infrastructure. Benioff says the company manages trillions of messages annually, most of which were previously one-way interactions.
“We do 11 trillion e-mails a year with our customers. 11 trillion e-mails a year with our customers. Trillion with a T. And each one of those has been a one-way conversation. But now we’re showing how there’s going to be an agent at the end of every single one of those e-mails. So they’re all two-way conversations.”
He adds that the new capabilities have directly reshaped staffing decisions.
“We’re transforming how we’re shaping sales. We’ve added more salespeople than ever before because our pipelines are bigger than ever before because we have agentic sales.”
Late last month, Benioff said the company became “customer zero” for its new agentic service and support platform. He also noted that the pilot has allowed him to shrink headcount in the support division dramatically.
“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.”