A company laid off 4,000 employees and replaced them with AI. The CEO of the company now explains why he did that.
Who is it about? Salesforce is a publicly traded US software company that offers cloud computing products for businesses. The company’s market value is estimated at 245.79 billion US dollars according to Eulerpool.
The founder, CEO, and billionaire Marc Benioff has now explained in a podcast that about 4,000 positions in customer service were eliminated. He justifies this step by saying that it has resulted in cost savings. This was reported by the English-language magazine Fortune.com.
According to the CEO, reducing the number of employees significantly lowered costs
This is what the CEO said: Marc Benioff recently revealed on the podcast “The Logan Bartlett Show” on YouTube that he has significantly reduced the number of employees in the support area. He said in the podcast:
I was able to rebalance the number of employees in my support area. I reduced it from 9,000 to about 5,000 because I need fewer employees.
If we had this conversation a year ago and you had called Salesforce, you would have been dealing with 9,000 employees worldwide in our Service Cloud managing, creating, reading, updating, and deleting data.
He added that he now needed fewer employees because technology can handle over a million customer conversations and support costs have been reduced by 17% since early 2025. Today, the same interactions occur as before, but “50% of them with [AI] agents and 50% with humans.”
Artificial intelligence is considered a major challenge for many areas. A CEO has shared in a conversation how he rebuilt his entire company to make it AI-ready. Employees who refused to use AI had to go: A CEO laid off almost 80% of his employees because they refused to use AI: Two years later he says he would do it again
