The CEO of Salesforce is going viral for his victory lap over replacing thousands of his employees with AI agents.
Exhilarated following a massive round of layoffs, Marc Benioff gave the world a first glimpse of Tesla’s third-generation Optimus humanoid robot during a visit with someone with an even bigger appetite for reduction. It hinted at a much bigger play brewing behind the scenes, one that could upend entire industries and rewrite the balance of power between human workers, virtual agents, and the coming wave of physical automation.
Benioff entered September 2025 boasting that his mega-company has entered a new era of AI-driven productivity. On the Logan Bartlett Show, the billionaire SFDC co-founder revealed that the King of SaaS had cut more than 4,000 customer support jobs.
“I’ve reduced it from 9,000 heads to about 5,000 because I need less heads,” he said, adding, “This is the most exciting thing that’s happened, you know, in the last 9 months for Salesforce.”
He described it as part of a shift toward agentic artificial intelligence, with 30 to 50 percent of internal work handled by AI across support, engineering, marketing, and analytics. Despite the cuts, he emphasized that humans still play a vital role, especially in complex scenarios.
His tone is markedly different compared to how he handled earlier Salesforce layoffs. It’s a shift from empathetic leadership to clinical efficiency. When he cut 10 percent of the company’s workforce back in 2023, he spoke directly to employees in an all-hands meeting. He leaned into Salesforce’s so-called Ohana culture that likens employees to family.
Just two years later, workforce reductions are no longer a source of shame. What was once packaged as a painful necessity is now proof of innovation.
The Salesforce leader’s comments rubbed many the wrong way. Critics called them tone deaf, accusing Benioff of downplaying the human cost of job loss to hype his company’s agent force offering. On Reddit, users identifying themselves as Salesforce employees called the claims exaggerated.
Investors remain skeptical about Salesforce’s AI platform, Agentforce, will generate enough revenue to justify the aggressive push. According to Salesforce, the platform powers autonomous agents that can resolve support tickets, execute marketing workflows, manage sales coaching, and review contracts for legal compliance
Salesforce faces an uphill battle as it positions its agentic platform as a competitor to Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini for Workspace. While Salesforce’s CRM software is used by hundreds of thousands of companies to manage customer relationships, Microsoft and Google are embedded much deeper into the daily workflows of employees.
As the Internet reacted to Benioff’s bold remarks, the CEO paid a visit to the man who arguably started the trend of making layoffs look cool.
After acquiring Twitter for $44 billion in October 2022, Elon Musk terminated around 50 percent of the social media giant’s workforce almost immediately. It sent a sent a signal to Wall Street, which began reframing layoffs as proof of efficiency rather than failure. Mark Zuckerberg cited it as an influence when he cut over 11,000 jobs at Meta, which he framed as a strategic pivot. Other Big Tech companies followed suit, and the bandwagon effect took hold downstream, with smaller startups and mid-sized SaaS companies copying the playbook.
During his visit to Tesla, Benioff received a private unscripted demo of the EV maker’s next-generation Optimus humanoid robot. When he asked the autonomous robot what it was doing, Optimus replied, “Just chilling. Ready to help.”
During his visit to Tesla, Benioff received a private unscripted demo of the EV maker’s next generation Optimus humanoid robot. Hey Optimus, what are you doing there?
In the demo at Tesla’s Freemont facility, a Gen 3 Optimus prototype, integrated with Grok AI, sported a golden exterior and humanlike hands that appeared to be aesthetic placeholders.
Optimus engineers are reportedly busy redesigning the third-generation robotic hand for mass production. Tesla originally aimed to manufacture at least 10,000 Optimus humanoids by the end of 2025. That goal is now being pushed into 2026.
During the demo, the Tesla bot paused before showing Benioff to the kitchen. Musk can be heard in the background saying it’s because the robot is being cautious for safety.
“Right now, it’s kind of paranoid about space,” Musk said.
Critics called the humanoid’s bipedal locomotion lackluster, while supporters pointed out that the prototype is still under development. Regardless, Benioff was impressed, calling it the “dawn of the physical Agentforce revolution” on the X social media platform.
The casual flex suggests he views Tesla as a potential partner. Integrating Optimus with Agentforce could give Salesforce the edge it’s looking for over Microsoft and Google. Agentforce would act as the AI brain managing digital workflows, while Optimus becomes the physical workforce handling real-world tasks.
Meanwhile, Chinese companies have reportedly exceeded their nationally set goal, manufacturing over 10,000 humanoids already in 2025.
Another perceived leader in the global humanoid robotics race, the Silicon Valley unicorn Figure AI, hopes to beat Tesla and China’s robotics firms to the mass market. The company just shared demo footage of its flagship humanoid robot, the Figure 02, putting dishes into a dishwasher. The robot’s hands demonstrated remarkable dexterity as it organized stacked plates, handled fragile glass, adapted to messy setups, and recovered gracefully from errors.
According to Figure founder Brett Adcock, the startup’s robots are learning rapidly thanks to massive injections of data into its end-to-end AI model called Helix. Figure is training its robots for mundane tasks as it seeks to fast-track their deployment into households. The company is targeting 100,000 shipped humanoids within the next four years.