Salesforce tiếp tục cắt giảm hàng nghìn nhân sự khi đẩy mạnh tự động hóa bằng AI

• Một kỹ sư phần mềm ở San Francisco bị mất việc ngay sau khi đưa con đi chơi tại Salesforce Park; anh là một trong số 262 nhân viên bị Salesforce sa thải trong tuần qua.

• Salesforce, công ty trị giá 240 tỷ USD, đã nhiều lần cắt giảm nhân sự, riêng năm 2023 giảm 8.000 vị trí và năm 2024 thêm 1.000.

• CEO Marc Benioff công khai ủng hộ AI, cho rằng công nghệ này hiện thực hiện đến 50% công việc tại Salesforce. Ông tiết lộ AI giúp giảm nhu cầu 4.000 nhân sự trong bộ phận chăm sóc khách hàng.

• Benioff gọi sự thay đổi này là “radical augmentation”, coi AI là cuộc cách mạng năng suất quan trọng nhất của công ty trong 9 tháng qua.

• Các công ty công nghệ khác cũng theo xu hướng tương tự: Microsoft đã cắt hơn 15.000 nhân viên trong năm 2025, còn Amazon cảnh báo nhiều công việc sẽ sớm biến mất do AI.

• Salesforce tung ra Agentforce, sản phẩm AI mới hỗ trợ khách hàng xử lý nhiều tác vụ nhanh hơn. PepsiCo là một trong số 12.500 khách hàng tham gia “digital labor revolution”.

• Các chuyên gia kinh tế như Erik Brynjolfsson nhận định AI vừa hủy việc làm cấp thấp, vừa tăng nhu cầu nhân sự cấp cao trong lĩnh vực AI.

• Ở San Francisco, Salesforce vẫn là nhà tuyển dụng tư nhân lớn nhất với 10.000 nhân sự năm 2024, đồng thời đóng góp kinh tế qua hội nghị Dreamforce thu hút 45.000 khách.

• Tuy nhiên, cổ phiếu Salesforce đã giảm 26% từ đầu năm 2025, cho thấy lợi ích tài chính từ AI chưa như kỳ vọng.

• Benioff vẫn khẳng định đây mới chỉ là khởi đầu của thời kỳ biến đổi lớn nhất ngành công nghệ.

📌 Salesforce đang trở thành ví dụ điển hình cho làn sóng tự động hóa bằng AI: cắt giảm hơn 9.000 nhân sự trong 2 năm qua, riêng 262 người tại San Francisco mới đây. Agentforce hỗ trợ 12.500 khách hàng, nhưng cổ phiếu lại giảm 26% năm 2025, phản ánh thách thức triển khai. Dù vậy, CEO Benioff tin rằng đây là bước ngoặt lịch sử, biến San Francisco thành tâm điểm thử nghiệm cho tương lai việc làm công nghệ.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/09/06/salesforce-benioff-automation-jobs/

Automation comes for tech jobs in the world capital of AI
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has made himself a cheerleader for AI’s potential to disrupt work while also laying off staff.
September 6, 2025 at 6:05 a.m. EDTToday at 6:05 a.m. EDT
7 min

Summary

The Salesforce Tower is reflected in windows of a building in downtown San Francisco. (Loren Elliott/For The Washington Post)

By Caroline O'Donovan
SAN FRANCISCO — One gray morning this week, a crowd of parents and baby-laden strollers gathered for a sing-along in Salesforce Park, five acres of public green space on the roof of the Salesforce Transit Center in the shadow of the 1,000-foot Salesforce Tower.
Among them was a local dad and software engineer who had learned days earlier that Salesforce was laying him off. The $240 billion cloud software company told 262 employees in San Francisco they were being let go, according to a state filing this week.
The purge is the latest in a series of layoffs at Salesforce as CEO Marc Benioff, a prominent Bay Area philanthropist, has made himself the poster billionaire for the idea that artificial intelligence is disrupting employment — and that it’s a good thing.
His zeal is turning the company, and potentially San Francisco, into a leading indicator of whether industry hopes for artificial intelligence will come true, and what that could mean for the sector’s well-paid workers.
💻
Follow Technology
Follow
Just about every tech leader is bullish on AI, but Benioff has been ahead of the pack when it comes to talking about the potential for it to transform or even replace what workers do. He told Bloomberg in June that the technology was already doing as much as 50 percent of the work at Salesforce.
Benioff said in a recent podcast interview with investor Logan Bartlett that the productivity gains from AI meant he needed 4,000 “less heads” in customer support. “This is the most exciting thing that’s happened, in the last nine months for Salesforce,” the CEO said.
Benioff’s embrace of AI disruption has helped make Salesforce a prominent example of a recent shift in Silicon Valley away from lavish perks and flexible working conditions toward layoff threats and stricter management.
Benioff refers to his staff as “Ohana,” a Hawaiian term for family, and over the years established for Salesforce a reputation for being people-oriented, with cute and furry mascots, deep civic engagement and an important role as San Francisco’s largest private employer.
As AI has rocked the software industry, the company’s stock price has struggled and Benioff has appeared to put embracing automation ahead of those warm-and-fuzzy vibes.
The software engineer in the park, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect his career, wasn’t sure he could be so easily be replaced by AI. Asked whether he believes Salesforce’s conspicuously community-oriented culture still exists, he smiled and said, “Less so now.”

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation CEO Summit in San Francisco in 2023.
Many large tech firms have cut staff since interest rates began to rise in 2022, as leaders have increasingly focused on efficiency. Benioff’s recent excitement about what he has called the “radical augmentation” of the workforce stands out.
Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella, who has laid off more than 15,000 staffers this year, said in a July letter to staff that the job losses required to pivot “from a software factory to an intelligence engine” were “weighing heavily on me.” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy warned staff in June that it will “need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today.”
The three companies, like many tech rivals, are trying to sell customers AI tools promised to increase productivity and disrupt work while rolling out similar tools inside their own workforces.
Salesforce unveiled a new AI product in October called Agentforce claimed to help customers accomplish more tasks in less time, for example by helping salespeople respond to customer leads that would previously have gone unanswered. PepsiCo is one of 12,500 Agentforce customers that will, according to a news release from the soda maker, become part of the “digital labor revolution.”
In his podcast interview, Benioff credited internal use of Agentforce for reducing his need for support agent “heads.”
Like other technologies, AI “has always been associated with both destroying jobs and creating jobs,” said Stanford economist Erik Brynjolfsson who studies its impact on the labor market. At tech firms, both seem to be happening at once, he said.
“[For] some of the entry level jobs the demand has fallen, but for the more senior jobs for AI experts, demand is soaring.” Brynjolfsson said.
Salesforce cut about 8,000 roles in 2023 and 1,000 in 2024. Annie Vincent, a company spokeswoman, said the reductions will affect Salesforce’s global workforce. Some are from vacated roles that weren’t backfilled, or staff who found other jobs at the company, which she said employees can do with help from a tool called Career Connect that sends notifications when new Salesforce roles pop up that fit their skills.
When asked how much layoffs and attrition each contributed to staff reductions, Vincent said, “We continuously assess our structure and rebalance as needed to best serve our customers and fuel growth areas.”
In 2024, Salesforce employed 10,000 people in San Francisco, according to local news reports. Vincent declined to say how many work there today.

Salesforce Tower rises above residential buildings in San Francisco. (Jeff Chiu/AP)
If a radical transformation in tech work is underway, no city is likely to feel its effect more than San Francisco, which Salesforce helped to make tech’s capital city when it established a headquarters here 25 years ago.
“Over the last quarter century, Salesforce has become the anchor employer … For well over a decade, they have been the largest private employer in the city, and San Francisco has benefited from that in a multitude of ways,” said Sean Elsbernd, president of SPUR, an urban planning group and a former member of the city’s Board of Supervisors.
Elsbernd said he hasn’t seen signs that AI is yet threatening that relationship. But if it did, “I would be very concerned for the city,” he said.
Salesforce Tower, the tallest building in San Francisco’s skyline, opened in 2018 with much fanfare. Two years later, the coronavirus pandemic threatened the idea that downtown tech workers would provide some of the stimulus needed to address the city’s inequality and homelessness while also supporting local bakeries, bars and spendy salad joints.
As the city faced first-in-the-nation office vacancies and rumors of a looming urban “doom loop,” Salesforce tried to hold back the tide by ordering workers back to the office. In a 2024 interview, Benioff said he could “feel a new wave of momentum in the city” and predicted an “AI boom loop.”
He was already thinking about efficiency gains: Earlier that year Salesforce CFO Amy Weaver said on an earnings call that the company was targeting its AI hiring in markets with a “low cost of living.”
Anne Taupier, San Francisco’s executive director of the Office of Economic and Workforce Development, said Salesforce continues to be an economic boon to the city. Its annual Dreamforce conference will take place in October and last year brought 45,000 visitors to San Francisco.
“Our office is working with the Salesforce HR team to ensure that any impacted employees have access to available career support resources,” Taupier said in an email statement.
News of the company’s latest San Francisco layoffs came after Salesforce offered lower than expected sales projections in its quarterly earnings last week. Some analysts took that as a suggestion that its AI products may not immediately become blockbusters. The company’s shares have fallen 26 percent this year.
Brynjolfsson, the Stanford economist, said it was early to expect definitive results from the technology. “Anyone who thought you could just buy AI and instantly get a payoff is disappointed right now,” he said.
Benioff remained undaunted. “This is just the beginning of the most transformative time in our industry ever,” he said on the earnings call last week. “I’ve never been more excited about anything in my entire career.”