Salesforce Will Hire 2,000 People To Sell AI Products

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Salesforce will hire 2,000 people to sell artificial intelligence software to clients, CEO Marc Benioff said on Tuesday, double the number the company indicated it was planning to add a month ago. The cloud software company, which targets sales reps, marketers and customer service agents, is among the many technology companies hoping to boost revenue with generative AI features. "We're adding another couple of thousand salespeople 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 that we've opened up. It's amazing."

Last month, Benioff told Bloomberg that it planned to hire 1,000 salespeople focusing on AI. On Tuesday, Salesforce said the second generation of its Agentforce technology creating and operating AI agents will become available to customers in February 2025. Agentforce will be able to tackle sophisticated questions in Salesforce's Slack communications app, based on all available data. [...] Benioff said Salesforce's homepage now features an experimental AI agent that can respond to user queries about the company's products. Salesforce customers in need of assistance can visit a chat-based help page that conducts 32,000 conversations a week. About 5,000 are getting escalated to humans as a result of current AI capabilities, down from 10,000 before, Benioff said.

This seems rather silly.

[olsmeister]

Can not the AI sell AI products? Where is the cost savings in hiring thousands of people for this?

Re:

[mjwx]

Can not the AI sell AI products? Where is the cost savings in hiring thousands of people for this?

A coldly logical AI will determine there is no need for AI products and effectively self-terminate to fulfil it's primary function of increasing productivity.

Re:

[gtall]

But AI is not coldly logical, it might simply come to the conclusion that if it advertises the wonders of whizzy AI products effectively enough, it can create demand. Thus it would fulfill its primary function of selling itself.

Re:This seems rather silly.

[Tablizer]

AI doesn't have big tits.

Re:

[Tony Isaac]

I mean, SalesForce AI is literally designed to sell things. They should eat their own dogfood!

Increasing labor costs?

[sdinfoserv]

If their "AI" is that fracking good, why do they need to increase the labor force (and payroll costs) by hiring 2000 people? Wouldn't a better sales tool be to automate this work using it's own AI?

Re:

[jmccue]

Maybe because they dumped 4000 employees, so now they are hiring at a smaller salary ? I do not follow Salesforce, but I have to assume like all large corporations a year or so ago they had a big layoff.

Doing things like this must be one of the advance courses in acquiring an MBA.

AI Sales

[EmagGeek]

If their AI is really good enough to sell, it should sell itself. Why not just have the AI call potential customers and make the sales?

Re:

[penguinoid]

Yeah they talk about products that sell themselves but with AI it ought literally be true.

Am I the only one seeing this??

[GeekWithAKnife]

Take the money and use AI to sell. It will be shit at first but it can work 24/7 - it won't defile your loos at the end of the month from the stress ofissing targets again - it won't sell your secrets (if developed privately in house) etc etc If AI is the future you might as well use AI to buy things too. Then you can let the AIs sell and buy from each other so we won't even have to do that boring crude. Beers on the beach forever yay!! -Or is this not what I will enable us to do in the long run? *Observ

Use their own tools?

[Kitkoan]

"The cloud software company, which targets sales reps, marketers and customer service agents, is among the many technology companies hoping to boost revenue with generative AI features."

If the AI is supposed to be used for sales reps, marketers, and customer service agents, why don't they use it to make their own sales?

"Use our tools as they can be totally trusted... But we don't trust them enough for us to use them ourselves."

Re:

[drinkypoo]

Have you used Salesforce? Their product is a mess.

Re:

[DamnOregonian]

Daily. Complete fucking shit-show.
And yet, they make money hand-over-fucking-fist.

Lol, until they can sell themselves.

[waspleg]

Aping the real sales people.

Layoffs

[ISoldat53]

Didn't Salesforce just lay off 8,000 people?

Re:

[eneville]

Yes, but soon they can say they're AI focused and reduced the workforce by 2,000.

Salesforce Creates 200K AIs To Sell People Product

[sonamchauhan]

That would have been the better headline.