Salesforce lays off staff working on Agentforce AI despite major push

Salesforce is reportedly carrying out another round of job cuts. In the latest round of layoffs, affected employees include those who were working on the company’s Agentforce artificial intelligence (AI) platform, a report claims. The latest layoffs come months after Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff suggested that the company could eventually adopt the Agentforce name as its corporate identity. According to a report by Business Insider, a regulatory WARN filing submitted by Salesforce in California indicated 86 job reductions across sales, technology, product, and general administration. The reported cuts come months after Salesforce eliminated nearly 1,000 positions in January and as the software company continues to increase its focus on AI-powered products. The report claims that the layoffs are also impacting teams associated with the company's MuleSoft integration software and Marketing Cloud products. However, Salesforce has not publicly commented on the latest layoffs. The company had more than 80,000 employees at the end of January, according to a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. The reported layoffs are notable because they affect employees working on Agentforce, Salesforce's flagship AI platform that the company has heavily promoted over the past year. What is Agentforce and what did Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff say about it Agentforce is Salesforce's answer to the growing demand for AI agents and automation tools. The company has increasingly repositioned its products around the platform as it seeks to expand beyond its traditional customer relationship management business. In a December 2025 interview with Business Insider, when Benioff was asked whether Salesforce would be rebranded as Agenforce, he said it would not be out of the question. “It might. That would not shock me,” Benioff said at that time. The CEO explained that customer conversations had increasingly shifted away from cloud computing and toward AI agents. "I dropped the word cloud totally. I did it at Dreamforce. Did you notice I never used it in the keynote? We learned in focus groups customers don’t talk about cloud anymore. They just want to talk about their agentic interface,” Benioff explained. As part of that strategy, Salesforce renamed several products under the Agentforce umbrella. Sales became Agentforce Sales, Service became Agentforce Service, and Platform was renamed Agentforce 365 Platform. Despite reports last year that Agentforce adoption was lower than expected and that some of its capabilities did not fully match product demonstrations, Salesforce said in May that Agentforce had surpassed $1 billion in annualised revenue. The company has argued that AI agents will play a larger role in how businesses interact with software, helping automate tasks and workflows across sales, customer service, and other functions.