Salesforce has eliminated roughly 4,000 customer-support roles as artificial-intelligence agents now handle about half of customer interactions, CEO Marc Benioff said on a podcast. Benioff said support headcount was reduced from about 9,000 to 5,000, citing efficiency gains from the company’s Agentforce tools. Salesforce later said it isn’t actively backfilling support roles and has redeployed hundreds of employees to other units. Shares of Salesforce fell 3.8% to $242.59 on Friday. Benioff previously said AI performs 30% to 50% of work at the company, including engineering, coding and service tasks, reflecting the broader corporate shift to automation since the rise of ChatGPT.
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