(NewsNation) — Artificial intelligence has enabled Salesforce to cut 4,000 customer support roles this year, CEO Marc Benioff said on a recent podcast.

With AI agents taking on more tasks, the San Francisco tech giant's support headcount has been reduced by nearly half.

"I've reduced it from 9,000 heads to about 5,000 because I need less heads," Benioff said on "The Logan Bartlett Show."

Benioff laid out the change like this: "If we were having this conversation a year ago, and you were calling Salesforce, there would be 9,000 people that you would be interacting with globally on our service cloud and they would be managing, creating, reading, updating and deleting data."

Now, half of those conversations are conducted by AI agents, with humans handling the rest, Benioff said.

The rise

See Full Page