Salesforce reduced its customer support headcount from about 9,000 to 5,000 after deploying AI agents that automate sales lead follow-up and customer interactions. The company employed 76,453 employees across divisions as of January. AI agents break tasks into multiple smaller steps and have increased productivity by contacting previously uncalled leads. More than 100 million leads accumulated over 26 years are now being contacted through agentic sales. An omnichannel supervisor helps coordinate human and AI collaboration, with roughly half of conversations handled by AI and half by humans. AI agents escalate tasks to humans when they cannot resolve an issue, and management structures and work distribution may shift as AI adoption grows.
"It's been eight of the most exciting months of my career," Benioff said. "I was able to rebalance my head count on my support," he said. "I've reduced it from 9,000 heads to about 5,000 because I need less heads."
"There were more than 100 million leads that we have not called back at Salesforce in the last 26 years because we have not had enough people," he said. "But we now have an agentic sales that is calling back every person that contacts us."
"It's not any different than you're in your Tesla and all of a sudden it's self-driving and goes, 'Oh, I don't know actually know what's happening, you take over,' and that's kind of the same thing," Benioff said.
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