Salesforce is reportedly eliminating over 1,000 jobs while hiring staff to sell its artificial intelligence products.
Workers who are displaced will be able to apply for other roles within the company, Bloomberg reported Monday (Feb. 3), citing unnamed sources.
It wasn’t clear which divisions were affected by the layoffs, the report said. Salesforce, a provider of customer management software, had nearly 73,000 employees as of January 2024, when its previous fiscal year closed.
Salesforce did not respond to PYMNTS’ request for comment.
Tech companies have gotten used to routine job cuts following a surge of layoffs in early 2023, according to the report. Amazon, Meta and Microsoft have all announced cuts so far this year.
Meanwhile, Salesforce has been hiring people for its new AI agent products, while also focusing on shoring up profit margins following pressure from activist investors in 2023, the report said.
“Just because we have a hit new product doesn’t mean that we ignore the commitments we’ve made internally and externally as we think about scaling this business,” Salesforce Chief Operating Officer Brian Millham said when asked about the company’s profit focus in December, per the report. “We’re looking across the entire company to say, ‘Where can we get more efficiencies? How can we continue to get fuel for the work that we’re doing to go invest in scale going forward?’”
Last month, Salesforce debuted a point-of-sale (POS) operating system built on generative AI.
“We’re not here to complement the status quo — we’re here to replace it,” Salesforce Senior Vice President and General Manager for Retail Nitin Mangtani told PYMNTS after the launch. “Retailers need technology that doesn’t just power transactions but transforms the entire shopping experience from discovery to checkout. That’s what this GenAI-powered POS is built to do.”
Businesses must respect today’s fluid consumer journeys, which cover both physical and digital touchpoints, he said. For example, a consumer might happen upon a product while watching a TikTok video, buy it online, and exchange it in-store.
“Unified commerce is not just a buzzword,” Mangtani said. “It’s table stakes. The consumer journey today is so intertwined that attributing success to one channel is nearly impossible.”
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