Salesforce will hire 2,000 people to sell AI products, CEO Benioff says

Salesforce will hire 2,000 people to sell artificial intelligence software to clients, CEO Marc Benioff said on Tuesday, double the number the company indicated it was planning to add a month ago.

The cloud software company, which targets sales reps, marketers and customer service agents, is among the many technology companies hoping to boost revenue with generative AI features.

“We’re adding 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 positions that we’ve opened up. It’s amazing.”

Last month, Benioff told Bloomberg that it planned to hire 1,000 salespeople focusing on AI.

On Tuesday, Salesforce said the second generation of its Agentforce technology creating and operating AI agents will become available to customers in February 2025. Agentforce will be able to tackle sophisticated questions in Salesforce’s Slack communications app, based 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 employees to better reflect economic conditions. As of Jan. 31, 2024, headcount stood at 72,682, down about 1% from two years earlier, according to filings.

Benioff said Salesforce’s homepage now features an experimental AI agent that can respond to user queries about the company’s products. Salesforce customers in need of assistance can visit a chat-based help page that conducts 32,000 conversations a week. About 5,000 are getting escalated to humans as a result of current AI capabilities, down from 10,000 before, 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 customer support, Benioff said, “you can’t find it.”

Microsoft did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.