Salesforce unveils a major hiring drive to sell AI products
- Marc Benioff confirms that 2,000 new sales jobs will become available
- Despite previous redundancies, 9,000 referrals have already been received for the positions
- Salesforce’s quarterly revenue continues to rise, now at $9.44 billion
After years of pandemic-induced layoffs, software giant Salesforce has confirmed plans to hire 2,000 new salespeople to help deal with increased demand for its new AI tools.
Company CEO Marc Benioff revealed (via CNBC) at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference that thousands of employees would be added to its workforce, which stood at more than 72,600 at the start of 2024.
At the event, he added: “We’re adding a few thousand more sellers to help sell these products… We already had 9,000 referrals for the 2,000 positions we opened. It’s great.”
Salesforce opens 2,000 new positions
Salesforce has invested heavily in artificial intelligence and will release the second generation of its Agentoforce in February 2025. Updates are also expected for the Salesforce-owned communications platform Slack.
Facing strong competition from Microsoft, which has ties to ChatGPT maker OpenAI, Benioff has pushed the company’s AI to sales representatives, marketers and customer service representatives in the race to become the go-to software provider.
However, the expansion plans are two-sided: while thousands of employees will have new opportunities, many have been laid off as a result of Salesforce’s technology. The company’s AI agent handles 32,000 customer queries every week, halving human intervention from 10,000 cases per week to just 5,000.
More broadly, the plans to hire 2,000 new staff are in stark contrast to previous moves. Approximately 1,000 employees have been laid off due to two separate rounds of layoffs in 2024 (via fired.fyi), of which more than 8,000 left the company in 2023 and another 1,000 in 2022.
Salesforce’s previous layoffs, all part of an effort to cut costs, can be seen more as a restructuring and a shift in priorities. In the three months ended October 31, the company reported $9.44 billion in revenue, up 8% year over year.
Benioff commented: “Agentforce, our complete enterprise AI system built into the Salesforce Platform, is at the heart of a game-changing transformation. The rise of autonomous AI agents is revolutionizing the global labor market and changing the way industries operate and scale. With Agentforce we are not only witnessing the future; we are leading it and unleashing a new era of digital work for every business and sector.”
Previous quarterly revenues have increased by 8%, 11% and 11%, representing consistent growth for the company.