Half of Salesforce’s 9,000 Customer Support Agents Could be “Redeployed”, Says Marc Benioff
By Henry Martin
April 29, 2025
Salesforce could shift around 4,500 customer support agents into “other roles” as Agentforce plays a greater part in handling contacts, Marc Benioff has said.
The cloud giant CEO told TECHtalk that he oversees around 9,000 support agents, and “about half of those” would be able to “transition into other roles” like sales development representatives (SDRs) and business development representatives (BDRs).
“We’ve Offloaded Half a Million Conversations”
It was reported earlier this year that Agentforce, Salesforce’s flagship AI suite, resolved 85% of queries from customers without any intervention from humans.
Salesforce cofounder and Slack CTO Parker Harris told the Agentforce World Tour that the other 15% of queries were escalated to humans, who would provide a “higher value interaction” regarding the more complex problems.
TECHtalk’s Keith Shaw asked Marc Benioff whether he was surprised by the 85% figure for Agentforce success.
Marc said: “What we’ve seen published from other vendors is in the 60% area, so we are getting excited that we’re in the 80s and 90s on a lot of our agent deployments, and we’ve done more than half a million conversations through the Salesforce agent, which is the one on help.salesforce.com.”
He added that because the customer has to log into their account, the agent will immediately know quite a lot about them and be in possession of all the data it needs to make the right decisions.
Marc said: “Now, it doesn’t totally eliminate the need for the human agent. And the cool thing about Salesforce is, here you are, you’re in the agentic platform, and now you want to go and have a corresponding experience with the human being. Our human agents and our automated agents, they’re blended together.”
The CEO said Salesforce is “feeling very good” about the value they are able to offer customers at the moment, using his own company as an example.
He added: “I have about 9,000 support agents at Salesforce. We have about 75,000 employees. I would say about half of those agents will probably be able to redeploy into all kinds of other, you know, revenue positions, SDR positions, BDR positions, because… we’ve offloaded half a million of those conversations to the agentic layer.”
But Salesforce is “Aggressively Hiring”… in Sales
The recent announcement from Marc is reminiscent of the news from December that Salesforce would not be hiring any further software engineers in 2025 – an announcement which caused some concern in the ecosystem about the role of AI.
More recently, Marc Benioff told the Pioneers of AI podcast that he was still “hiring very aggressively” to expand Salesforce’s customer organization by 10-20% this year.
He said: “In engineering, I’ve achieved higher productivity, so I’m maintaining a flat headcount. When it comes to customer support, I’m reducing headcount because I don’t need as many support agents. This allows me to rebalance and shift priorities.”
In an article published on Salesforce Ben on April 28 this year, we revealed that, at the time of writing, Salesforce was hiring 186 customer success positions, 653 sales positions, and 106 software engineering positions.
Final Thoughts
It’s no surprise that Salesforce is seeking to use AI tools – including its own product, Agentforce – to enhance its own productivity and, as Marc Benioff put it, “redeploy” existing staff to other areas.
Proponents of AI might be quick to point out that, while some roles may no longer be needed, opportunity will open up elsewhere – which appears to be happening, to some degree, with Salesforce hiring more salespeople as it cuts back or maintains staff levels in other areas.
But the more pessimistic might not be entirely comforted by this because, if your role is the next one in the AI productivity boost crosshairs, there’s no guarantee you’ll be able to find a similar role elsewhere.
