Dialing in to capitalize on the artificial intelligence revolution, Salesforce is hiring for its AI team in large numbers. The cloud software giant had expressed its plans to expand its AI workforce a month ago. but had indicated that it would hire around 1,000 new workers. However, now we see that Salesforce is expecting to create around 2,000 new roles to sell AI to its clients.
Salesforce’s AI expansion will require sufficient staff to market the products it has in mind, for which it needs sales reps, marketers, and customer services agents to join its team.
Image: Marc Benioff | Dreamforce 2024
Salesforce Is Set on Hiring for Its AI Team to Prepare for Upcoming Technology
Salesforce is opening up 2,000 new roles for its AI venture and it has already received 9,000 referrals for these open positions. The company’s hunt for salespeople is still ongoing, but it likely won’t be long before it fills up the open position with interested workers. Salesforce’s plans to hire are heartening to see, considering the weak job market that many workers have been confronted with recently.
Salesforce has had its own share of layoffs in these last two years, with the bigger round of job cuts having occurred at the start of 2023, where around 10% of the workforce was cut. Another 700 jobs were eliminated in January 2024, and 300 workers were then let go in July.
More recently, the company revealed that job cuts were to be expected in its newly acquired company, Own. The cuts at the firm are expected to extend into 2025, while Salesforce gradually takes over the business operations. Following the report of these cuts, Salesforce’s hiring for its AI marketing team is a positive turn of events to round up the year.
The Salesforce AI Expansion Plans Take Center Stage
Salesforce’s AI expansion is moving forward in full swing, revealing that the second generation of Agentforce technology is coming to customers in February 2025. This AI technology is particularly interesting as it is responsible for creating and operating AI agents that can help with running a client’s business.
The technology will allow businesses to deploy automated digital workers across their organization, offloading some of the more repetitive, rote responsibilities to them. The AI agents will be able to respond to questions in its Slack messaging app, consolidating available data to respond to a query.
Such technology is largely meant to provide an alternative to a manual search or the need for a human agent, so it’s interesting to hear Salesforce and Benoiff’s AI-centric hiring plans for marketing this particular project.
CEO Marc Benioff pointed out that in order to see an example of how this technology works, the company homepage has a glimpse of the AI agent that handles visitors to the page. The chat-based help page is said to manage over 32,000 conversations in a week, of which only 5,000 require additional human support. This is a big step forward from the 10,000 conversations that previously required human escalation.
Salesforce’s AI expansion plans indicated that its AI agents can be used as an organization’s first layer of customer query interaction, where the tools respond to the basic requirements of the user. If more complex and in-depth help is necessary, actual agents can step in. Salesforce is far from the only company that offers this service, however, its hiring plans for the AI team suggest it aims to expand the scale of its services to become a client’s first preference.
