Date:
December 18, 2024
Marc Benioff said that his HR teams have received an overwhelming response of 9,000 referrals for the 2000 open positions.
Salesforce, one of the top cloud-based CRM solutions companies, is now pacing hard to boost revenues from genAI software. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff announced over 2,000 job openings for sales professionals to sell its suite of artificial intelligence software to clients. This number is double the indicated job openings the company announced last month.
“We’re adding another couple of thousand salespeople to help sell these products. We already had 9,000 referrals for the 2,000 positions that we’ve opened up. It’s amazing,” said Benioff during an event in San Francisco.
These hirings are being made strictly on the basis of capabilities to sell AI products and services. The closest possible reason for the boosted hiring numbers is Salesforce’s launch of the second generation of Agentforce technology. By February 2025, Salesforce will roll out capabilities to create and operate AI agents for global clients and prospects. The time left for the official launch is enough to hire new sales professionals and train them to readiness.
According to the company, Agentforce will be able to tackle more complex and sophisticated questions in the Salesforce Slack communications app without escalating them to a human resource.
Benioff also revealed during the event that a new experimental AI agent is available on Salesforce's homepage. This AI agent will answer all queries related to the company’s products and will offer personalized guidance to customers on what suits their business needs the best.
The current chat-based help page answered over 32,000 customer queries last week. Out of these, only 5,000 conversations were escalated to humans as the AI chatbot’s capabilities upgraded. This number is halved from 10,000 escalations before.
Benioff also took a dig at one of his closest competitors, Microsoft Azure, claiming that they do not offer transparent communication around how its Co-Pilot branded AI tools help automate customer support. However, both Microsoft Azure and Co-Pilot’s websites have AI Agents deployed to answer client queries.
In response, Microsoft said, “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.”
The recent move by Salesforce toward boosting genAI-focused revenues indicated a strong relevance of AI in sales and customer relationship management. With rapidly evolving AI capabilities, AI agents will soon reduce manual intervention needs by a significant number, further boosting the revenues of both service providers and business clients.
