Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff speaks on the Dreamforce convention in San Francisco on Sept. 17, 2024.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Photos
Salesforce will rent 2,000 folks to promote synthetic intelligence software program to purchasers, CEO Marc Benioff mentioned on Tuesday, double the quantity the corporate indicated it was planning so as to add a month in the past.
The cloud software program firm, which targets gross sales reps, entrepreneurs and customer support brokers, is among the many many expertise firms hoping to spice up income with generative AI options.
“We’re adding another couple of thousand salespeople to help sell these products,” Benioff mentioned at an organization occasion in San Francisco. “We already had 9,000 referrals for the 2,000 positions that we’ve opened up. It’s amazing.”
Final month, Benioff informed Bloomberg that it deliberate to rent 1,000 salespeople specializing in AI.
On Tuesday, Salesforce mentioned the second technology of its Agentforce expertise creating and working AI brokers will turn out to be out there to clients in February 2025. Agentforce will have the ability to deal with subtle questions in Salesforce’s Slack communications app, based mostly on all out there knowledge.
Salesforce is ramping up its AI gross sales group nearly two years after asserting it was shedding greater than 7,000 workers to higher replicate financial circumstances. As of Jan. 31, 2024, headcount stood at 72,682, down about 1% from two years earlier, based on filings.
Benioff mentioned Salesforce’s homepage now options an experimental AI agent that may reply to consumer queries in regards to the firm’s merchandise. Salesforce clients in want of help can go to a chat-based assist web page that conducts 32,000 conversations every week. About 5,000 are getting escalated to people because of present AI capabilities, down from 10,000 earlier than, Benioff mentioned.
Microsoft has been promoting a collection of Copilot-branded AI instruments. However in case you verify Microsoft’s web site to see how it’s automating buyer assist, Benioff mentioned, “you can’t find it.”
The web sites for Copilot and Microsoft’s Azure cloud do have brokers, although.
“It’s so interesting Benioff said that, given Microsoft runs one of the world’s largest customer support teams — and we’ve been customer zero for Copilot from the very start,” Microsoft’s chief advertising and marketing officer for AI at work, Jared Spataro, mentioned in a press release. “In customer service, Copilot is helping resolve cases 11.5% faster. Our sales teams are seeing real impact too, driving 9.4% higher revenue per seller and freeing up time to focus on strategic, value-driven work.”
