ChatGPT launched only three years ago. Since then, leaders including Marc Benioff and Jensen Huang have been adamant that cheaper alternatives to labor won’t cause mass unemployment.
But in reality, the technology is slashing human headcounts at major companies—including Salesforce, which has cut 4,000 of its customer support roles for AI agents to pick up the work.
“I was able to rebalance my headcount on my support,” Marc Benioff, CEO of the $248 billion computer software company, recently revealed on the podcast The Logan Bartlett Show. “I’ve reduced it from 9,000 heads to about 5,000, because I need less heads.
“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, deleting data,” he added. Today, those same interactions are happening, but “50% are with agents, 50% are with humans.”
And he doesn’t see his hybrid AI-human workforce as an otherworldly future. “I don’t think it’s dystopian at all,” he added. “This is reality, at least for me.
