Salesforce to Hire 3,300 in AI-Driven Turnaround

Salesforce, which in January said it would eliminate 8,000 jobs to cut costs—nearly 10% of its global workforce of more than 70K—has announced that it now will hire 3,300 as artificial intelligence fuels workforce needs in its expanding data cloud services.

At the company’s annual Dreamforce conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, Brian Millham, the chief operating office at Salesforce, said the new hires will be equally split between sales, engineering and the company’s data cloud service, Bloomberg reported.

“We have some very successful parts of our business right now, and we want to surge in those areas,” Millham said.

“Our job is to grow the company and to continue to achieve great margins. We know we have to hire thousands of people,” CEO Marc Benioff said.

Benioff said a new success metric for the company will be bringing back “boomerangs”—people who moved on to other tech companies from Salesforce. According to Bloomberg’s report, Benioff said he held an “alumni event” at the Dreamforce conference to tell boomerangs “it’s OK, come back.”

In June, Salesforce unveiled AI Cloud, its platform for serving text-generating large language models (LLMs). AI Cloud is offering LLMs trained by a range of partners, including AWS, Anthropic, Cohere and GPT pioneer OpenAI.

The San Francisco-based customer relations software giant also is offering first-party models trained by Salesforce’s research division to drive capabilities including code generation and business process automation.

Salesforce has introduced nine LLMs based on its flagship products, including Sales GPT, Service GPT, Marketing GPT, Commerce GPT, Slack GPT, Tableau GPT, Flow GPT and Apex GPT.

According to the company’s website, Sales GPT can quickly auto-craft personalized emails, while Service GPT can create service briefings, case summaries and work orders based on case data and customer history.

Marketing GPT and Commerce GPT can generate audience segments for targeting and tailoring product descriptions to each buyer based on their customer data; the bots can also provide recommendations on how to increase average order value.

Slack GPT and Flow GPT let users build no-code workflows that embed AI actions. Tableau GPT can generate visualizations based on natural language prompts and surface data insights. Apex GPT can scan for code vulnerabilities and suggest inline code for Apex, Salesforce’s proprietary programming language.