Salesforce Reportedly Laying Off 1K Workers While Adding AI-Focused Sales Roles

Salesforce is planning to eliminate 1,000 jobs and hire workers for new AI products, according to Bloomberg, which cited an unidentified source. The displaced employees will reportedly be able to apply for other internal positions.

As of January 2024, the San Francisco-based company had nearly 73,000 workers. Approximately 51% of Salesforce employees are located in the U.S., and 49% are located internationally.

Salesforce is expected to report its fourth-quarter earnings by the end of February.

Salesforce’s AI focus and open sales roles

The customer relationship management software company has not said where the internal cuts will take place; however, in tandem with the reported layoffs, the company is currently actively hiring salespeople to promote its AI products to customers.

Salesforce has signed more than 1,000 paid deals for its platform Agentforce, which creates AI-powered virtual representatives, according to CEO Marc Benioff. In a December 2024 podcast, Benioff said Salesforce would not be hiring more software engineers this year because of productivity gains of more than 30% from AI.

What is Agentforce?

Agentforce agents operate autonomously and retrieve data on demand to build action plans for any task and execute it without the need for human involvement. For example, an agent can use customer engagement data to identify an opportunity to upsell and generate a personalized email to a prospect. It is natively integrated into the entire Salesforce Customer 360 platform.

Agentforce “is the only thing that really matters today,’’ Benioff said in the podcast.

Companies using the platform include Wiley, OpenTable, Saks, and ezCater, according to Salesforce.

Other tech company layoffs

Massive layoffs began at tech companies in 2023, and the trend has continued. So far this year, Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook parent company Meta have all moved to trim their corporate workforces. Microsoft targeted employees it classified as low performers, Business Insider reported.

In late 2024, layoffs occurred at various tech organizations including Yahoo, Calendly, AMD, iRobot, Mozilla, and Akamai.

Independent layoffs tracker Layoffs.fyi reported that so far this year, 31 tech companies have laid off just over 7,000 employees. There were more than 150,000 job cuts among 542 companies in 2024, and 264,000 in 2023, the site reported.
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