Salesforce’s aim to become agentic enterprise could spur copycat mass redundancies across customer base
Big tech CEOs are celebrating AI triumph, but what happens when their corporate customers follow suit? Will more AI agents replace people’s jobs, purchasing power and livelihoods? And when replicated on a global scale, how will households, companies and economies survive?
If you’ve been monitoring interviews with chief executives over the past year—particularly those pouring millions or even billions into artificial intelligence to transform prospects into sales—you’ll notice a shared, almost childlike enthusiasm in their pursuit of AI-driven supremacy.
What’s conspicuously absent from these conversations?
Genuine empathy for employees who’ve had to digest the news that they’ve been made redundant and replaced by an AI agent.
These “performance-driven” redundancies are difficult for anyone on the receiving end to comprehend. If more employers choose an AI agent over a human, where does that leave purchasing power and the global economy? Not with the agents, since they don’t earn a living—they simply exist to serve.
And those who still have jobs?
They’ll be working alongside AI agents, reporting to an agentic supervisor (human for now). Whether human sales staff are working harmoniously or competitively with AI agents remains to be seen.
One of the most telling examples emerged from an interview with Marc Benioff, the co-founder and chief executive of Salesforce. Speaking to podcaster and MD of Redpoint Ventures Logan Bartlett, Benioff discussed the transformative impact of AI on Salesforce’s customer support and sales conversions over the past eight months.
“I need fewer heads”
The Salesforce chief boasted about the success of the agentic service and support product, which has enabled the company to handle 1.5 million customer conversations while achieving similar performance scores—all while reducing support headcount from 9,000 to 5,000 employees.
“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 fewer heads,” said Benioff without a hint of empathy or regret.
Like any CEO, he’s focused on sales conversions. I get it, the reach and sales conversions are mind-blowing. For example, Salesforce’s agentic approach has enabled it to contact 100 million leads for the first time in 26 years, according to Benioff, resulting in 10,000 leads being converted into pipeline weekly.
The chief executive emphasised the broader application of AI across the company, including on their website and in Slack, where agents assist with various tasks.
Benioff described the period as remarkable:
You look at the last eight months and it’s been eight of the most exciting of my career. When you look at what’s happened with applications and with software, it’s pretty awesome.
Salesforce is even posting Blogs to ease the fear of a future where companies favour an agentic/digital workforce. In a recent interview, Salesforce VP of Workforce Innovation Ruth Hickin emphasised that AI-powered work can also be “meaning-first” work.
“We have to design for meaning-first jobs. We don’t want to lose entry-level workers; as a society, we don’t want to end up with mass unemployment,” she said.
“New jobs can become more interesting and complex because we can automate tasks that were previously given to people simply because it was their first job.”
Yet among the justifications for layoffs is a swathe of the population out of work. New research reveals Gen X workers face the longest unemployment periods after layoffs, with nearly 25% still seeking work from the past decade’s redundancies.
“Customer zero”
Benioff explained in the podcast how Salesforce has become “customer zero” for its new agentic service: “We have now done about a million and a half conversations with customers, and at the same time, that’s the agentic layer speaking to customers. A million and a half conversations also happened through our support agents during that same period, and the scores were about the same, which was stunning.”
The transformation extends beyond mere cost-cutting. Benioff revealed that 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, so we just couldn’t call them back.”
Now, he explained, “we have an agentic sales [team] that is calling back every person that contacts us in our company, and we’re doing about just for our own company, more than 10,000 leads a week right now having conversations, turning them into pipeline.”
This has allowed Benioff to redeploy human resources strategically, yet layoffs have still taken place: “I can now put those heads into sales. So I’ve increased my distribution capacity.”
The chief executive has positioned Salesforce as a pioneer in what he calls the “agentic enterprise” model. The company has deployed agents across multiple touchpoints, including their website, where visitors can now interact directly with AI agents powered by the company’s data cloud.
Copycat corporate layoffs
“This is really the beginning of every part of the company having this kind of agentic augmentation. It’s a force multiplier,” explained Benioff. “It’s a synergistic effect between me and the agents,” adding that thousands of other companies are now deploying similar systems.
Benioff emphasises the persistent need for human employment, but perhaps not at past levels. “This is about humans and AI working together, not wholesale replacement of human beings,” he said. “Or if that opportunity exists, somebody needs to explain it to me, because, as the CEO of a 75,000-person company, I can’t figure it out.”
MIT economist and labour expert David Autor suggests, “The industrialised world is awash in jobs, and it’s going to stay that way.”
That said, with unemployment figures rising in the US and UK, notably in the tech sector, tech sector workers might have to take such comments with a pinch of salt (and a shot of tequila) to make the redundancy fears go away.
The Great Flattening
According to Stanford University researchers, these AI-motivated layoffs are creating a “Great Flattening” of management across Big Tech. Researchers found some concerning optics when it comes to AI-spurred unemployment:
- 13% drop in employment for people 25 years and under with entry-level roles exposed to AI
- AI-related job cuts create disruption across the entire employment chain
- Morgan Stanley is reportedly considering cutting 14,000 management positions to save $4bn
- Microsoft has already cut 15,000 jobs
- In recent years, Google has eliminated 35% of its management roles covering small teams
AI and employee engagement
When discussing the broader implications, Benioff emphasised that the technology represents more than just automation: “We are working in partnership with these agents, and that’s how I look at it.”
The Slack integration has been particularly extensive, according to Benioff:
I now have, you know, a couple dozen agents running inside Slack on my behalf, doing renewals, you know, doing support, but also, like doing my wellness benefits, doing, you know, all kinds of interactions with my employees.
He described the Slack marketplace as “probably the most exciting, most thriving ecosystem in tech for the enterprise, right now.”
Human cost of agentic companies
However, the human cost of this agentic transition runs far deeper than the 4,000 support redundancies and the thousands of other layoffs announced across the ech sector. According to an August 2025 Market Gains podcast, Salesforce’s job cuts represent a systematic pattern spanning years.
“In 2023, Salesforce started massive layoffs. Some people say in the past few years, Salesforce probably fired about 12,000 people,” the Market Gains podcast revealed.
The scale is eye-opening. Market Gains reported that in 2023 alone, Salesforce “fired approximately 8,000 employees. 10% of their entire workforce is basically gone.”
The podcast highlighted that this extends beyond mere redundancies—the company has “basically halted hiring despite the US population rising exponentially, despite record amounts of college graduates.”
More troublingly, Market Gains noted that Salesforce continued this pattern with “a thousand people being fired” in both 2024 and 2025, with predictions of “thousands more in the upcoming few months.” Most significantly, they revealed that Benioff has declared, “We’re in a white collar recession and Salesforce won’t be hiring engineers due to AI.”
Has big tech stopped hiring?
This represents an unprecedented shift in the tech industry. As the Market Gains podcast observed: “I have never seen a big tech company say they’ve stopped hiring engineers… Usually, big software companies, especially good ones, are always hiring engineers.”
Yet Salesforce has “basically halted the hiring of human beings,” according to Market Gains, with Benioff suggesting that future CEOs “will be managing humans and digital workforces” rather than purely human teams.
The broader impact is visible. Market Gains shared testimony from affected workers, including one woman whose husband, despite “15 years of niche technical experience” and an MBA, has spent “6 months of looking at 100 applications, gotten four HR screener calls, and that’s it.”
The economic impact of agentic mass layoffs
If AI agents don’t purchase products or services, what happens to the economy when they replace the consumers who do? As Benioff pioneers his “agentic enterprise,” the broader implications for employment and economic stability remain largely unaddressed, despite the enthusiastic figurative fist bumps shared between big tech CEOs.
As Benioff himself noted in an X post after the Bartlett interview: “Over 26 years, 100M+ people contacted Salesforce, we couldn’t call back. Not anymore. Agentic Sales—built into our Sales app—means every prospect gets a real qualifying conversation. Just like Agentic Support in our Support app. Deeply integrated into the world’s #1 CRM, Humans + Agents drive customer success together.”
The reality, however, suggests that in this partnership, humans will increasingly end up the junior participants. How can they compete with AI and remain in employment?
And will working for companies that embrace mass agentic integration be a risky career move? Would it be a safer bet to work in industries that are human and relationship-focused? Startups that require engineering experience with human-to-human customer deliverables? Or do those not exist anymore?
