Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff speaks at the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco on September 17, 2024.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
sales force CEO Marc Benioff said Tuesday that the company plans to hire 2,000 people to sell artificial intelligence software to customers, double the number of people the company had indicated a month ago it planned to hire. .
The cloud software company, which targets salespeople, marketers and customer service agents, is one of many technology companies hoping to increase revenue with generative AI capabilities.
“We’re adding thousands of additional salespeople to help sell these products,” Benioff said at a company event in San Francisco. “For the 2,000 positions we have advertised, we have already received 9,000 referrals, which is amazing.”
Last month, Benioff told Bloomberg that the company plans to hire 1,000 salespeople with a focus on AI.
Salesforce announced Tuesday that its second-generation Agentforce technology for creating and operating AI agents is scheduled to be available to customers in February 2025. Agentforce will be able to tackle advanced questions in Salesforce’s Slack communications app based on all available data.
Salesforce is ramping up its AI sales team, nearly two years after announcing it would lay off more than 7,000 employees to better reflect economic conditions. According to the filing, the number of employees as of January 31, 2024 was 72,682, a decrease of about 1% from two years ago.
Benioff said Salesforce’s homepage currently features an experimental AI agent that can respond to users’ questions about the company’s products. Salesforce customers who need support have access to a chat-based help page with 32,000 conversations per week. About 5,000 people are being escalated to humans as a result of current AI capabilities, down from 10,000 previously, Benioff said.
microsoft has been selling a series of AI tools under the Copilot brand. But when you check Microsoft’s website to see how Microsoft automates customer support, “you won’t find it,” Benioff said.
However, there are agents on Copilot and Microsoft’s Azure cloud websites.
“Benioff’s comments are very interesting given that Microsoft runs one of the largest customer support teams in the world, and we were customer zero for Copilot from the beginning,” said Microsoft’s chief AI officer. Marketing Director Jared Spataro said in the article. statement. “For customer service, Copilot resolves cases 11.5% faster. Our sales teams are also seeing real impact, increasing revenue per seller by 9.4% and increasing strategic, value-driven I now have time to focus on work.”
