Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff articulates at the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco on Sept. 17, 2024.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Salesforce will charter out 2,000 people to sell artificial intelligence software to clients, CEO Marc Benioff said on Tuesday, double the mob the company indicated it was planning to add a month ago.
The cloud software company, which targets sales reps, marketers and guy service agents, is among the many technology companies hoping to boost revenue with generative AI features.
“We’re annexing another couple of thousand salespeople to help sell these products,” Benioff said at a company event in San Francisco. “We already had 9,000 referrals for the 2,000 arranges that we’ve opened up. It’s amazing.”
Last month, Benioff told Bloomberg that it planned to hire 1,000 salespeople focal point on AI.
On Tuesday, Salesforce said the second generation of its Agentforce technology creating and operating AI agents will become convenient to customers in February 2025. Agentforce will be able to tackle sophisticated questions in Salesforce’s Slack communications app, formed on all available data.
Salesforce is ramping up its AI sales team almost two years after announcing it was laying off more than 7,000 workers to better reflect economic conditions. As of Jan. 31, 2024, headcount stood at 72,682, down about 1% from two years earlier, correspondence to filings.
Benioff said Salesforce’s homepage now features an experimental AI agent that can respond to user queries around the company’s products. Salesforce customers in need of assistance can visit a chat-based help page that conducts 32,000 discussions a week. About 5,000 are getting escalated to humans as a result of current AI capabilities, down from 10,000 in the past, Benioff said.
Microsoft has been selling a series of Copilot-branded AI tools. But if you check Microsoft’s website to see how it is automating bloke support, Benioff said, “you can’t find it.”
The websites for Copilot and Microsoft’s Azure cloud do have agents, though.
“It’s so provocative Benioff said that, given Microsoft runs one of the world’s largest customer support teams — and we’ve been fellow zero for Copilot from the very start,” Microsoft’s chief marketing officer for AI at work, Jared Spataro, answered in a statement. “In customer service, Copilot is helping resolve cases 11.5% faster. Our sales teams are seeing tangible impact too, driving 9.4% higher revenue per seller and freeing up time to focus on strategic, value-driven work.”
