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Salesforce is significantly ramping up its efforts to sell artificial intelligence software, with plans to hire 2,000 additional salespeople to focus on AI products, CEO Marc Benioff announced this week.Â
This marks a sharp increase from the 1,000 hires the company had originally planned to add just a month ago, according to CNBC.
Benioff revealed the hiring surge during an event in San Francisco, emphasizing the growing demand for AI-powered tools in customer service, sales, and marketing. The company has already received 9,000 applications for the 2,000 available positions.
In his comments, Benioff pointed to Salesforce’s ongoing push to incorporate generative AI into its offerings, particularly for its cloud-based software targeting sales teams, marketers, and customer service professionals.Â
He also unveiled plans for the second generation of Salesforce’s Agentforce technology, which is set to launch in February 2025. This new version of Agentforce will leverage AI to answer complex questions within Salesforce’s Slack app, using all available company data to provide tailored responses.
The decision to bolster Salesforce’s AI sales team comes nearly two years after the company made significant workforce cuts in response to changing economic conditions, laying off over 7,000 employees. As of January 2024, Salesforce had 72,682 employees, a slight 1% decrease from two years earlier.
Salesforce is also experimenting with AI tools directly on its website. The company has added an experimental AI agent to its homepage that can answer product-related queries from users.Â
Additionally, its AI-powered chat system, which handles around 32,000 conversations weekly, is showing progress. About 5,000 of these conversations are escalated to human agents, a significant reduction from 10,000 before the latest AI improvements, Benioff noted.
Salesforce’s bold move comes as other tech giants, including Microsoft, continue to expand their own AI offerings.Â
Microsoft has integrated generative AI tools, branded as Copilot, into its customer support and sales functions. However, Benioff made a pointed remark about Microsoft’s customer service operations, saying that their website doesn’t highlight how AI is being used to automate support.
In response, Jared Spataro, Microsoft’s Chief Marketing Officer for AI at Work, defended the company’s AI integration.Â
He noted that Copilot is helping resolve customer service cases 11.5% faster and boosting sales revenue by 9.4% per seller. Despite Benioff’s comments, Spataro said that Microsoft’s AI tools were already driving meaningful results for their teams.
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