AI to shake up Salesforce workforce with possible shift to sales over IT

Salesforce apparently wants to cut 1,000 jobs to hire new staff elsewhere as part of an effort to bring its new AI products to customers, according to financial news service Bloomberg, citing internal sources.

Employees who are being laid off can apply for other positions in the software company, Bloomberg reported. It is not known which departments are specifically affected by the job cuts. 

Salesforce completed its 2025 fiscal year at the end of January, with results to be announced this month. A year ago, the SaaS specialist reported a team of just under 73,000 employees. But Salesforce has had a rollercoaster ride with its employee numbers in recent years. Just under 50,000 at the beginning of 2020, Salesforce’s employee rolls climbed to over 79,000 three years later. Founder and CEO Marc Benioff later admitted that the company had hired too many new staff during the pandemic.

Salesforce is currently focusing its efforts on Agentforce, a new platform for developing autonomous AI agents introduced in fall 2024. 

“Agentforce ushers in a new era,” Benioff announced a few months ago, setting out the goal of integrating AI agents deeply into the company’s processes and platform. The new AI generation promises significantly more efficiency and automation, the CEO promised.

Salesforce doesn’t need new software developers

This apparently also applies to internal processes at Salesforce. In mid-December 2024, in a conversation with venture capital specialist Harry Stebbings, Benioff revealed that the SaaS provider would not hire any more software developers in 2025.

Benioff cited the fact that the productivity of its own development teams had been increased by more than 30% with the help of Agentforce and other AI techniques. Benioff spoke of an incredible development speed that his company had achieved with AI support.

Salesforce also wants to cut staff in other areas. Benioff spoke of needing fewer support specialists in the future because the provider has inserted an AI agent layer into its support processes. But the Salesforce CEO admitted that more employees are needed in sales. At this point, the company’s main focus is on explaining to customers what advantages they could achieve by using the new AI techniques.

SAP is also restructuring its team

A number of IT providers are currently restructuring their workforces. At the beginning of 2024, SAP announced a restructuring that would affect around 8,000 positions. SAP officials said that these were measures to align qualifications and resources with future business requirements. Terms such as layoffs and job cuts were avoided. In 2024, the company wanted to place a stronger focus on key strategic growth areas such as AI for companies, it said. 

Over the course of the past year, there were indications that the restructuring could be more extensive than originally planned. In August 2024, SAP spoke of 9,000 to 10,000 jobs that would be affected by the restructuring. Most of these would involve voluntary programs and internal retraining measures, it said. The program should therefore be completed in early 2025 and cost around three billion euros.

In absolute terms, SAP reported a slight increase in personnel numbers for 2024. At the end of 2023, the company still employed a good 106,000 people worldwide, but by the end of 2024, this figure had risen to over 107,000.

Interesting side note: While areas such as cloud and software, research and development, services, and others increased their workforce slightly, SAP — unlike Salesforce — cut back on personnel in sales and marketing. At the end of last year, this department employed around 750 fewer people than a year earlier.