Salesforce has slashed another 4,000 jobs from its customer support workforce as the tech giant doubles down on artificial intelligence, even as the company reports strong financial results.

The latest layoffs gutted Salesforce’s customer service division, reducing its headcount from 9,000 to 5,000. AI agents now reportedly handle about one million customer conversations.

In a recent episode of The Logan Bartlett Show, CEO Marc Benioff justified the cuts by saying he “needs less heads” as Salesforce invests heavily in AI across its operations.

Earlier this year, Benioff boasted that AI was already doing 30 to 50 percent of the work, which he framed as efficiency gains – a 17 percent cost reduction achieved after shedding 1,000 people in February.

On Wednesday, the Slack owner reported revenue topped $10.2bn for the quarter ending July 31, up 10 percent from the same period last year. The company also announced a $20bn increase in its share buyback plan.

“These results reflect the success of our customers – like Pfizer, Marriott and the US Army – who are transforming into agentic enterprises, where humans and AI agents work side by side to reimagine workflows, accelerate productivity, and deliver customer success,” Benioff said.

“We exceeded all our financial targets while achieving our 10th consecutive quarter of operating margin expansion, delivering strong returns and maximising value for our customers and shareholders.”

But the business software provider also forecast that the current quarter revenue would be below Wall Street estimates, as clients dial back spending on its enterprise cloud products due to macroeconomic uncertainty.

Shares of the San Francisco, California-based company fell more than 4 percent in trading after the bell.

Benioff, whose annual compensation package was valued at $55m, has openly embraced automation as a central pillar of Salesforce’s future even as thousands lose their jobs. He insists the aggressive replacement of people with machines is worth celebrating, calling the past year of AI expansion “the eight most exciting months of my career”.

This is not new for Salesforce. In early 2023, Benioff oversaw a mass layoff of 7,000 workers, roughly 10 percent of the company’s global workforce, although later in the year, the cloud computing giant hired 3,000 workers.

A mixed message

“Just months ago, they [Salesforce] downplayed AI’s threat to jobs. The latest action raises important questions on trust in the sector. It’s very damaging and gives rise to a climate of fear among the industry’s wider workforce,” tech consultant Waseem Mirza told Al Jazeera.

In July, Benioff echoed that softer line, insisting AI would “augment” rather than replace people. Just a day before announcing the layoffs, he doubled down on that reassurance in a post on X.

“Our agentic future is not preordained. If AI replaces human judgment, creativity, empathy, we diminish ourselves,” he wrote.

“This is quite an important signal that this says to the tech sector with the biggest AI-driven layoffs thus far and could lead to a copycat effect across the sector,” Mirza said.

“The disruption is growing day by day, and we are going to see it continue.”

Salesforce is not alone. Recruit Holdings, the parent company of Indeed and Glassdoor, cut 1,300 jobs amid its AI shift in July. Klarna laid off 40 percent of its workforce earlier this year. Duolingo announced in April it would stop hiring contractors and replace them with AI.

“Internally [at Salesforce], these cuts can be read as a way to maximise efficiency and ultimately shareholder value. But there’s a risk when companies cut too deeply in junior positions; they may be undermining their own future talent pipeline, which could hurt them strategically in the long run,” Fabian Stephany, assistant professor for AI and Work at the University of Oxford, told Al Jazeera.

That concern is widely shared across the industry. Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, told the outlet Axios earlier this year that AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs.

“Highly exposed” fields have seen a 13 percent relative decline in opportunities for workers aged 22-25 between October 2022 and July 2025. In tech specifically, the effect is even more amplified. Opportunities for software engineers have fallen 20 percent, according to new research from Stanford University.

After the publication of this article, a Salesforce spokesperson told Al Jazeera that some employees  have been reshuffled to other divisions of the company.

“We’ve successfully redeployed hundreds of employees into other areas like professional services, sales, and customer success,” the spokesperson said.