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SF's Salesforce begins 2,000-worker 'hiring surge' for selling AI

By Stephen Council

SF's Salesforce begins 2,000-worker 'hiring surge' for selling AI

Salesforce's new artificial intelligence product is billed as a labor replacer, meant to answer questions and tackle tasks previously fielded by customer service reps. But the San Francisco tech giant still needs a lot of humans to hawk that product -- enough so that CEO Marc Benioff just announced a massive hiring spree.

In November, Bloomberg reported that Salesforce was planning to hire 1,000 more salespeople to sell its "Agentforce" product to clients. Then, on Tuesday, CNBC had a new number straight from Benioff himself: 2,000 new hires all for those AI sales.

"We're adding another couple of thousand salespeople to help sell these products," the CEO said at a San Francisco event, per the outlet. "We already had 9,000 referrals for the 2,000 positions that we've opened up. It's amazing."

Salesforce spokesperson Annie Vincent confirmed Benioff's statement to SFGATE on Wednesday, calling the plan a "hiring surge for Account Executives" and saying it began in November. The hiring is global, including in Salesforce's home city, she said.

The huge buildup is a testament to Benioff's focus on the relatively unproven "Agentforce" technology, which the customer relationship management company hyped up incessantly at September's Dreamforce conference before rolling out in October. "Agentforce" is a layer of Salesforce's software package, providing customers who buy in with quick-to-set-up "agents" that can complete various simple tasks in sales, marketing, commerce and more. (SFGATE wrote about the tool's potential to push out entry-level workers back in September.)

Indeed, in a CNBC video interview published Wednesday alongside Salesforce's announcement of "Agentforce 2.0," Benioff sounded almost comically optimistic talking about the product. "I've never been more excited about anything in my entire career," he said. "We're seeing really the future of work itself."

He said Salesforce has used "Agentforce" to cut the number of customer questions that escalate to a human from about 10,000 to 5,000 out of around 36,000 queries each week. He touted the prospect of replacing people with the AI product: "We can have less support agents, human support agents, more digital support agents. We can mix our human labor with our digital labor in a new way and create an incredible new Salesforce."

The company has sold "Agentforce" to 1,000 customers so far, he said in the video interview, and the new mass of salespeople will no doubt grow that group. On Salesforce's careers site, the keyword "account executive" currently prompts 874 jobs, with 84 in San Francisco.

Though not unique, the hiring effort is a break from a general trend of layoffs and "leanness" in Bay Area tech. Salesforce laid off 10% of its workforce in 2023, including at least 1,150 assigned to San Francisco, SFGATE reported. But in September of that year, Benioff told Bloomberg he would be adding 3,300 workers, mainly for its data cloud, engineering and sales teams.

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