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Salesforce CEO Benioff tragically brags that AI is letting him cut heads [1]

['Jason Weisberger']

Date: 2025-09-05

Mark Benioff made more tone-deaf statements about how AI is allowing him to eliminate thousands of jobs from Salesforce's staff.

While the actual numbers, unsurprisingly, appear smaller than the CEO claimed, the gleeful march towards sending people home and replacing them with bots is far too telling. Benioff claims 4,000 of 9,000 "support" people were either let go or repurposed.

"I was able to rebalance my headcount on my support," Benioff said. "I've reduced it from 9,000 heads to about 5,000 because I need less heads." This statement spawned a glut of headlines saying that Salesforce had laid off 4,000 workers — an unconfirmed statistic, given that Benioff said later in the interview that he'd moved some people into sales roles. But he did, in the interview, call the growth of AI support, "the most exciting thing that's happened in the last nine months for Salesforce." The CEO, as SFGATE reported in May, has called some of the discourse around AI replacing jobs "alarmist," and in Wednesday's earnings call, he poked fun at hype over "artificial general intelligence," a much-used term to describe AI that can do most human work. Nonetheless, the nascent technology is pushing some Salesforce workers out of their roles. SFGate

It appears that only 262 of these individuals were identified by Salesforce's WARN Act filing. Hopefully, someone in the government takes a look at that giant gap.

Previously:

• Change.org petition to light Sauron's Eye above Salesforce Tower San Francisco

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[1] Url: https://boingboing.net/2025/09/05/salesforce-ceo-benioff-tragically-brags-that-ai-is-letting-him-cut-heads.html

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