All the buzz about AI job displacement is for coding jobs, but customer support jobs might end up being impacted even more by AI.
Salesforce has said that it has cut 4,000 customer support roles by replacing them with AI agents. These AI agents have reportedly boosted the company’s productivity. Salesforce is using AI for sales calls as well, and it says it’s happy with the results.
“It’s been eight of the most exciting months of my career,” Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said on a podcast. “I was able to rebalance my head count on my support. I’ve reduced it from 9,000 heads to about 5,000 because I need less heads,” he added. He said 50% of conversations were now being done by AI, and 50% by humans. He added that humans were still required to be in the loop, because AI agents can realize that they can’t handle a task and need human support.
Benioff also said that AI was being used to make sales calls. “There were more than 100 million leads that we have not called back at Salesforce in the last 26 years because we have not had enough people,” he said. “But we now have an agentic sales that is calling back every person that contacts us.” He added that an “omnichannel supervisor” helps human and AI agents collaborate with customers.
Salesforce has been proactive about integrating AI into its workflows. The company had said in January that it wouldn’t hire any more software engineers this year because of the gains it was seeing from AI. In June, Benioff had said that AI was doing 30-50% work at the company. He’d also said that he expects to be the last CEO of Salesforce who only managed humans.
Companies other than Salesforce have also been using AI for their customer support. Last year, Klarna had said that its AI chatbot was doing the work of 700 customer support employees. Meesho has said that it had reduced its support costs by 75% after replacing humans with bots, and increased customer satisfaction by 10%. And with Salesforce now saying that it has managed to cut 4,000 customer support jobs, it appears that many customer support roles could be on a path to not exist in the coming years.