Salesforce layoffs, customer service. Is Marc Benioff a serial liar?

Salesforce is laying off 4,000 employees, who will be replaced by AI agents. A year ago, it claimed that AI would not lead to redundancies or job losses. Yesterday, Teleperformance's share price fell further to €64.80. AI agents, their actual performance, cost price and implementation costs, and the impact they are likely to have on major contact centre employers: TP, Concentrix, Foundever, Konecta, Accenture, Alorica, Cognizant, etc.

Marco Mouly has found his master in the CRM sector: Marc Benioff, who has become immensely wealthy thanks to his CRM offered and leased in SaaS mode. It may be useful to decipher the ‘encyclicals’* of these tech and AI gurus.

Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, believes that AI agents are more efficient and less expensive than human employees for providing customer service and level 1 sales support. Should we believe everything the author of Trailblazer says? ‘Where are you talking from?’ asked Pierre Bourdieu. Klarna had told the same story, that customer service agents could be replaced by chatbots. The company has since backtracked on its predictions and is relaunching its IPO plans. 

Below are extensive excerpts from an interview and an article broadcast on NBC television, along with some additional context. 

“I’ve reduced it from 9,000 heads to about 5,000, because I need less heads," 
Benioff said while discussing the impact of AI on Salesforce operations.

Salesforce has cut 4,000 of its customer support roles, CEO Marc Benioff recently said while discussing how artificial intelligence has helped reduce the company headcount.

Benioff revealed the layoffs during an interview published Friday on the Logan Bartlett Show Podcast.  

“I’ve reduced it from 9,000 heads to about 5,000, because I need less heads," Benioff said while discussing the impact of AI on Salesforce operations.

Salesforce has been on the front lines of the AI revolution and has built what it calls an "Agentforce" of customer service bots.

"Because of the benefits and efficiencies of Agentforce, we've seen the number of support cases we handle decline and we no longer need to actively backfill support engineer roles," Salesforce said in a statement Tuesday to NBC Bay Area.

AI will ruin people's lives and eliminate thousands of jobs because growth is what matters
A few prominent figures and experts have nevertheless analysed these announcements and what lies behind them, providing useful perspective because the Salesforce CEO's comments are indeed somewhat biased:

Laurie Ruettimann, a specialist HR consultant, recommends that employees develop new skills because AI will affect many sectors and jobs. Analyst Ed Zitron points out that companies are now primarily keen to attract investors by telling them that they will be using AI agents to become more efficient and profitable. ‘It's just a growth at all costs mindset,’ Zitron said. "The only thing that's important is growth, even if it ruins people's lives. Even if it makes the company worse and provides an inferior product." It doesn't matter if the service deteriorates or the product quality declines; the important thing is to attract investors with prospects for profitability growth. Replacing hotline and support technicians and sales representatives with AI agents that prospect with pre-recorded messages inevitably reduces costs.  

One day white, the next day black
A year ago, Marc Benioff said exactly the opposite: ‘AI won't lead to a white-collar wipeout’. In February 2024, instalment payment specialist Klarna announced that AI agents had replaced 700 people in its customer service department, resulting in savings of £30 million. Sebastian Siemiatkowski, its CEO, has since backtracked on these claims, stating that, following numerous customer complaints, a largely automated customer relationship proved to be less effective.

Salesforce sells AI and the implementation of Agents at a high price.   
To implement Agentforce within your company, you still need to equip yourself with Service Cloud and then pay €2 per conversation handled. This is a far cry from a frugal CRM, which is the magic of SaaS. In comparison, an experienced call centre agent, located in sub-Saharan Africa for example, can efficiently handle around 10 conversations or customer service tickets per hour for a telecom operator or Chronopost, with an average handling time of 4 minutes, by talking to the customer. With BPO specialists charging around €10 per hour for their services, this is at least 50 to 60% cheaper than Salesforce. If we add to this the analysis of the quality and compliance of the conversation, which is now possible thanks to speech analytics tools (and costs around 14 cents per four-minute conversation), the cost per conversation comes to €1.14. 

We have too many leads (leads: sales opportunities that need to be dealt with quickly).
The Salesforce boss will mainly deploy agents to generate more business, to finally call back all the prospects that his conventions and intensive marketing enable him to identify on a daily basis.

“We have so many leads that we can't follow up on them all. Salespeople basically cherry-pick which leads they want to call back. Thousands of leads, tens of thousands of leads, hundreds of thousands of leads have never been called back (..) But in the agentic world, there's no excuse for that. Every lead can be followed up on.” Interview with the CEO in Fortune. Summary translation: we have rich people's problems and too many leads to deal with, to the point where salespeople choose which of these prospects they are going to call back. In and thanks to the agentic world, all leads can be called back and solicited. 

When he speaks, Marc Benioff is primarily thinking about his short-term interests, even if it means contradicting himself. But unlike Marco Mouly, the CEO will not end up being pursued by police forces around the world, because the movement is global and customer protests are futile. Once they have installed and connected their SaaS tools, publishers are almost impossible to dislodge. French accountants have understood this, belatedly and painfully, after seeing a 300% increase in Silae's payroll software, which has a virtual monopoly.   

Enshittification. The shittification of the customer experience is underway
In a book due to be published in October, Canadian author Cory Doctorow explains the movements and reasons behind this trend, for which he has coined a neologism that can be translated as the shittification of the customer experience.  

We have reached a stage where many companies and platforms (which had made the customer experience, its fluidity and the care taken to satisfy customers and users one of their assets) no longer have an interest in investing in this CX but, on the contrary, in increasing their profits by reducing costs. This, in a nutshell, is the subject of the book, reviewed here. 

Emeria (Foncia), Velux, LCL: when everything is over-automated
This summer, the editorial team at En-Contact detailed and analysed how this trend is taking shape, and not necessarily in a positive way, for example in banking at LCL, in personal equipment at Velux, in property management at Foncia, now Emeria. The availability of customer services and owners is often disastrous. At LCL, CRM and telephony software called Flow, deployed by Worldline, malfunctioned severely and rendered branches and advisors unavailable for many months. But Flow was inexpensive, three times cheaper than its competitors Genesys and Odigo.  

Is this decline inevitable? Will AI agents replace us all? 
No, some companies, including French ones, have designed different tools and approaches and have made the sensible deployment of these AI tools the core of their offering and proposition. Examples include companies such as Comete.ai, Callity, AlloBrain and Volubile.ai, whose customers are very satisfied (non-exhaustive list).

— For example, a major player in the temporary employment sector has just improved the performance of its operations with the team led by Frédéric Donati, co-founder of Comète.ai.
— The DITP, the French government agency, has improved the citizen and user experience with AI and the help of AlloBrain.

Comme j'aime and Acheel, two rapidly growing SMEs, have implemented systematic customer feedback monitoring in their sales and support departments using Callity.

The retail and physical store sector is also affected: in less than two years, more than 600 stores have equipped themselves with French SaaS software, Arcane Mag, which automates time-consuming, complex tasks that are key to improving store performance. ‘For staffing and store scheduling, tracking sales performance by advisor, reconciling CRM data, WhatsApp, etc., I used to have to do everything on 35 Excel spreadsheets,’ explains Alexandre Dheilly, owner of several stores in Cholet. ‘I recouped the cost of the software in four months and now I couldn't do without it.’

Speaking on Radio Canada more than a year ago, Cory Doctorow explained that enshittification was not inevitable.

Marc Benioff is therefore:
— stronger in communication than Daniel Julien, the former CEO and founder of Teleperformance, which employs more than 500,000 people worldwide, is the largest private employer in Tunisia and Colombia, and one of the largest in the Philippines. And whose business is set to partially disappear. But its shares, listed on the CAC 40, were languishing yesterday at €64.80.

— and more direct and appealing, even if it means overselling the future a little. Sooner or later, the major global players in BPO will have to acknowledge that they have too many staff, given the impact of AI and the performance of conversational agents. Probably 15% of their workforce, according to our forecasts and what we are actually seeing in contact centres. 15 or 20%, not 44.44%**.

Manuel Jacquinet.

*Encyclical: letter sent by the Pope to all bishops.

**The announcement by the CEO of Salesforce tends to suggest that in the software sector, 44.44% of customer service tickets or sales enquiries can be handled by AI agents.