Salesforce lays off staffers as executive leadership churn continues

Salesforce has laid off a fresh round of employees as the cloud CRM software giant continues to grapple with ongoing churn in its executive leadership ranks, underscoring a period of internal restructuring as the company seeks to sharpen its focus on scaling AI-driven offerings, such as Agentforce, across enterprises.

The company has reduced close to 1,000 roles earlier this month across teams, including marketing, product management, data analytics, and its Agentforce AI unit, Business Insider reported, quoting employees familiar with the matter.

Job cuts tied to AI realignment

Salesforce has been downsizing over the past two years, paring back its workforce through multiple rounds of layoffs and more recently freeing up headcount to hire in areas tied to its AI push.

Last year in February, Bloomberg reported that the company’s plans to reduce up to 1,000 roles to push offerings, such as Agentforce, which the company launched towards the end of 2024.

That downsizing decision came as Salesforce’s employee base swelled rapidly from 50,000 to 79,000 employees during the pandemic before the company acknowledged it had overhired.

At the beginning of 2023, the company had decided to lay off about 10% of its workforce, roughly 8,000 employees, and close some offices as part of a restructuring plan.

Prior to that, the CRM giant had laid off nearly 950 staffers in November 2022.

The fresh round of layoffs, according to Forrester vice president and principal analyst Charlie Dai, is a clear indication of AI and automation replacing human workers.

“Teams in marketing, product, data, and Agentforce were hit as automation expands. The rise of coding‑assist tools and AI‑driven development workflows also lowers demand for traditional roles and even traditional SaaS apps,” Dai said.

The analyst’s comment is reminiscent of another Salesforce’s move to downsize 45% of its customer service roles, taking the total strength of that team down from 9,000 to 4,000 just five months back in September last year.

An email sent to Salesforce seeking details of the layoffs went unanswered at the time of publication.

Executive exits signal deeper transformation

The mass layoffs are far from being the sole change at Salesforce. The CRM giant has been seeing a steady stream of senior executive exits over the past few months, with the latest being Adam Evans, who was EVP and GM of Salesforce AI, a unit that powers the development of Agentforce.

In a LinkedIn post announcing his exit this Sunday, Evans said he had decided to move on from Salesforce to pursue a new phase focused on building startups.

Separately, Ryan Aytay, who led Salesforce’s Tableau unit, disclosed his departure last week, while Slack chief executive Denise Dresser left the company in December to take on the role of chief revenue officer at OpenAI.

The departure of these top executives, who were tapped to lead an acquired division in 2023 and integrate it with the rest of the company, is a sign of Salesforce undergoing its own transformation, given the rapid rise of AI agents putting pressure on SaaS vendors, said Yugal Joshi, partner at Everest Group.

“In this pursuit, it is not uncommon for a strategic disconnect in senior leaders to lead to some churn. Moreover, some leaders believe they can drive and build more innovative companies outside of a large firm,” Joshi noted.

“We see this becoming an industry trend where other companies will poach senior leaders, and some will quit to drive their own initiatives. In addition, some initial failures to make Agentic promise a reality in enterprise applications will also lead to leadership churn,” Joshi added.

Salesforce, in recent months, has faced criticism from analysts due to its recalibration of Agentforce, impacting CIOs and their AI implementation timelines.

Salesforce has yet to name a successor for Aytay, but has named Madhav Thattai, who was previously the COO of Salesforce’s AI unit, as Evans’ successor.

Similarly, Rob Seaman, who was the chief product officer at Slack, has taken over Dresser’s responsibilities, but only as EVP and GM of Slack.

Both Thattai and Seaman will report to Salesforce chief digital officer Joe Inzerillo, who has expanded his remit as president of enterprise and AI technology, putting Slack and the Agentforce platform under his oversight.

Other notable leadership changes include Iain Mulholland taking over as chief security officer, joining from Google, where he served as deputy CISO for Google Cloud and technical infrastructure.

Mulholland succeeds Brad Arkin, who stepped down at the end of January. In addition, Salesforce has named veteran Patrick Stokes as its new chief marketing officer, following the departure of Ariel Kelman, who reportedly left this week to join AMD.