Salesforce still sees a place for live customer service agents after massive cuts

Dive Brief:

• Salesforce’s AI agents have handled “millions of conversations” in recent months while human agents deliver expertise and empathy on calls that need it, co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff said during a Q2 2026 earnings call.
• On Salesforce’s own website, help.salesforce.com, AI agents addressed 1.5 million inquiries in the past 9 months, according to Benioff. The company’s customer service workforce is still in the thousands, and CSAT scores have remained steady.
• While Salesforce still sees a role for live agents, the vendor reduced its customer support workforce from about 9,000 people to about 5,000, Benioff said on a podcast.

Dive Insight:

Even though Salesforce is investing heavily in agentic AI, executives recognize the limitations of the technology.

The large language models that power the technology can’t achieve 100% accuracy, according to Benioff. He estimates that Salesforce’s own efforts put its AI agent in the 90% range. As a result, people continue to play an important role in customer service.

“Yes, there’s a lot that we can resolve automatically through these agents with the customers, but there’s also a lot that cannot be resolved,” Benioff said during the call. “And that has to be escalated to the humans, and so it’s humans and agents working together to satisfy customer success.”

Studies have supported the importance of human interaction in customer experience. More than 4 in 5 people say they’d still prefer human support even if wait times and time spent are the same, according to a HubSpot and SurveyMonkey survey. Moreover, a Verizon study found that 88% of consumers report satisfaction with human-led digital customer service interactions, while the share drops to 60% for AI-only interactions.

Several of Salesforce’s partners, including DirecTV and Reddit, have been using agentic AI to reduce their customer service agents’ workloads.

DirecTV’s AI agents execute 50,000 actions a week and have saved billing representatives nearly 300 hours of inquiry handling in under a year, according to Benioff. Reddit reduced its average resolution time from 8.9 minutes to 1.4 minutes.

Williams Sonoma is partnering with Salesforce to power its AI customer service assistant, which rolled across its retailer portfolio last week. The same technology will support Williams Sonoma’s planned agentic culinary companion, which will assist with meal prep and product discovery.

Salesforce’s revenue was up 10% year over year to $10.2 billion in the second quarter of fiscal 2026, which ended July 31, according to a company earnings report. Data Cloud and AI annual recurring revenue rose 120% year over year to $1.2 billion.