Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff speaks at the Dreamforce conference on September 17, 2024 in San Francisco.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Salesforce It will hire 2,000 people to sell artificial intelligence software to customers, CEO Marc Benioff said Tuesday, double the number the company said it planned to add a month ago.
The cloud software company, which targets sales reps, marketers and customer service agents, is among many tech companies hoping to boost revenue with AI-powered features.
“We’re adding another thousand vendors to help sell these products,” Benioff said at a company event in San Francisco. “We already had 9,000 referrals for the 2,000 positions we’ve opened. It’s amazing.”
Benioff said last month Bloomberg That it planned to hire 1,000 salespeople focused on AI.
On Tuesday, Salesforce said second generation By February 2025, AI agents created and operated by Agentforce technology will be available to customers. Agentforce will be able to answer sophisticated questions in Salesforce’s Slack communication app based on all available data.
Salesforce is ramping up its AI sales team nearly two years after announcing it dismissal More than 7,000 employees to better reflect economic conditions. On January 31, 2024, there were 72,682 employees, about 1% less than two years earlier, signings.
Benioff said Salesforce’s homepage now includes an experimental AI agent that can answer users’ questions about the company’s products. Salesforce customers who need help can visit a chat-based one help page which conducts 32,000 interviews per week. About 5,000 are being upgraded to humans as a result of current AI capabilities, down from less than 10,000 before, Benioff said.
Microsoft Copilot is selling a range of branded AI tools. But if you look at Microsoft’s website to see how it automates customer service, Benioff said, “you won’t find it.”
Microsoft did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
