In 2024, heavy layoffs across the technology sector prevailed as an unfortunate trend. Market instability, tightened budgets, and restructuring knock-on effects have been touted as just some of the reasons behind these layoffs, but what has 2025 dealt so far, and how is the rest of the year likely to look?
Salesforce has promised that Agentforce will be this cloud’s silver lining, but if tech market shifts and recent layoffs are anything to go by, then it’s clear that even this CRM giant is not immune from such trends.
2024’s Layoffs
In 2024, 546 tech companies laid off 152,074 employees according to Layoffs.fyi. In Salesforce, 1000 employees formed part of this statistic last year, shaking the ecosystem after the company laid off 10% of its workforce the year before.

That being said, in November last year, Salesforce actually announced that it would hire 1000 new employees due to Agentforce developments.
Outside of Salesforce, companies like Meta, OpenAI, and Microsoft reported layoffs or layoff plans in 2024.
What Does That Mean for 2025?
Unfortunately – although perhaps unsurprisingly – layoffs have continued in 2025 across the tech industry.
Meta was one of the first, announcing that it would be laying off 5% of the workforce earlier this year. These layoffs are the result of speeding up performance cuts in order to get rid of “low performers”.
Marc Zuckerberg, who said he anticipates an “intense” year, believes that now is more important than ever to have only top performers going forward, according to the BBC. The number of people expected to be affected by these layoffs has not been disclosed, but it could be around 3,600.
It was also reported by Business Insider that fintech giant Stripe would be laying off 300 employees, as uncovered in a leaked memo. The employees affected reportedly have roles in product, engineering, and operations.
Although the company says it plans to grow its headcount by 17% in 2025, this news comes just 3 years after a 14% company-wide round of layoffs in 2022 due to COVID-19 overhiring.
What About Salesforce?
At the beginning of February, it was reported that Salesforce would undertake its first set of mass layoffs since July 2024, laying off 1000 people.
This likely comes as a result of letting go of low performers and restructuring to prioritize future Agentforce initiatives.
At the original time of writing this, there are currently 83 jobs on Salesforce’s career site matching the phrase ‘Agentforce’, which is an 80% increase since we last reported on this number in December last year.
However, Agentforce still hasn’t sealed the deal for a lot of professionals or their customers, so we could be facing the dilemma of too many people in roles that will be underutilized, which could just result in restructuring or further layoffs in the end.
The Threat of Artificial Intelligence
There will likely be considerable pressure for professionals to quickly upskill in AI technologies like machine learning and predictive analytics to stay competitive, especially in a company like Salesforce. Although this won’t directly link to layoffs, it likely will affect the structure of SaaS companies as they advance throughout the year.
Not only that, but AI also has the potential to dismantle the labor market from the bottom to the top, leaving just senior professionals to oversee AI, especially if a technology like Agentforce gets big enough.
If we look at the latest layoffs in 2025 and their relation to the threat of AI, we can begin to paint a clearer picture. For example, with Meta, Mark Zuckerberg’s reference to an “intense year” can possibly be linked to Meta’s plans with their own AI and the positioning of this AI amongst the other players in its ‘race’. Mark also admitted to laying off employees last year in order to “invest in long-term, ambitious visions around AI.
Oliver Shaw, CEO of UK-based planning software platform Orgvue, said that these layoffs do play into the AI trend, signaling the movement towards more AI-centric focuses, as reported by CCN.
“AI is automating workloads and enhancing workflows, leading the charge in reshaping roles across sectors, but while it fuels innovation, automation brings reduced demand for certain skillsets, meaning workforces need to be restructured.” Oliver Shaw, CEO at Orgvue
Startups: Look Out
According to Tech Crunch, more startups shut down in 2024 than in the year prior, likely signaling the mass death of companies funded in the height of the COVID tech boom days of 2020 and 2021.
This is something that was observed in the Salesforce ecosystem around 2021 when a selection of ISVs benefitted from a total of $1.35B in funding. Some of the biggest names included Sonar, which has experienced a 7% headcount growth in the last year, AutoRABIT, which has experienced a 6% increase, and Elements.cloud, which experienced a 5% increase.
However, on the other hand, other companies on the list such as Provar and Dooly experienced a 2% decrease in the last year and a 19% decrease in the last 6 months respectively. Hopefully, post-COVID restructures shouldn’t go on to affect companies like this, but 2025 will definitely show us who the top players in the market are.
Peter Walker, the head of Carta, said that we should “expect” more shutdowns like this due to the natural course of business developments, but that it’s difficult to predict just how many more there will be.
Carta’s data suggests that SaaS companies are taking the biggest hit, making up 32% of shutdowns, which doesn’t spell out good news for an ecosystem like Salesforce’s.
That being said, Salesforce has just celebrated 15 years of Salesforce Ventures, their program dedicated to supporting enterprise startups, which has attributed over $6B of capital investment into more than 630 companies across 35 IPOs and 32 countries.

Whether startups in the ecosystem face disaster in the next year remains unclear and difficult to predict, but it is clear that a strong focus on industry-relevant ideas, processes, and solutions is more important now than ever due to less room for error.
Of course, a big part of focusing on industry-relevant ideas will sit within the AI space, and startups are likely facing a couple of challenges here. For one, if new ideas or products aren’t enhanced with some kind of AI functionality, it risks falling behind existing products or services in the market. On the other hand, if startups have been or plan to focus on AI-centric SaaS solutions, then they might find themselves at risk of superior technology that comes out of the blue, much like what happened with DeepSeek.
Final Thoughts
January has unfortunately been a busy month for layoffs, and there’s no telling what the rest of the year will look like.
However, hopefully, Agentforce will continue to reinstall hope in both the ecosystem in the labor market, which Salesforce is likely thinking deeply about. Additionally, if we have predicted an uptick in M&A activity correctly, then we could see a lot more buying and saving of high-performing companies across the ecosystem, as well as the preservation of a fair few jobs.
- This post has been updated to reflect the latest news on Salesforce’s layoffs.