Salesforce (CRM) is an enterprise software company and one of the world’s top Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems.
The company offers a variety of services, from helping businesses centralize and organize their sales pipelines to managing customer service operations and marketing campaigns.
And for nearly two decades, Salesforce has enjoyed unrivaled dominance in the CRM industry; however, rising competition from Microsoft (MSFT) and HubSpot (HUBS), along with recent pressure to accelerate its AI-based solutions, caused CRM shares to fall 20% in 2025.
One unfortunate result of Salesforce’s shift toward an AI-driven, “agentic” enterprise was layoffs — a lot of them. According to CNBC, in September 2025, the company eliminated 4,000 customer support positions because AI was now handling up to 50% of the company’s work.
Those 4,000 people represented nearly 5% of the company’s total workforce — and the cuts have continued in 2026.
Here’s what Salesforce’s workforce looks like now.
How many employees does Salesforce have in 2026?
According to Salesforce’s latest Annual Report, the company had 83,334 employees as of January 31, 2026.
This number includes everyone from the software engineers and data scientists who build Salesforce’s cloud and AI platforms to its account executives, customer support teams, and corporate roles, such as those in finance and HR.
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Where are Salesforce employees located?
Salesforce has offices spread across North America, Europe, Asia, and Latin America.
The company maintains offices in 93 cities, including Atlanta, Indianapolis, New York, London, Chicago, Seattle, Dublin, Mexico City, Sydney, and Tokyo.
Its main headquarters are in San Francisco — in fact, it employs 10,000 people there, representing nearly 12% of its total workforce.
Salesforce’s main offices are located in the Salesforce Tower (415 Mission Street), a 61-story glass-and-steel obelisk in downtown San Francisco. The skyscraper is actually the tallest building in the city and the second-tallest in the state (only the Wilshire Grand in Los Angeles is taller).
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Inside Salesforce’s 2026 layoffs
As the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic waned in 2023, Salesforce cut 8,000 jobs, the largest employee reduction in the company’s history. The company also reduced its office space, with CEO Marc Benioff telling The New York Times: “We hired too many people.”
The Times reported that the company had around 48,000 employees before the pandemic began, but its headcount ballooned to roughly 80,000 workers on increased demand as businesses began allowing employees to work from home and still needed to collaborate remotely.
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This marked the beginning of a broader strategy to streamline operations and focus on core areas of growth — specifically AI.
On September 12, 2024, Salesforce introduced its “Agentforce” platform, a series of autonomous agents designed to help streamline a business’s customer service, sales, marketing, and ecommerce functions, all powered through its proprietary “agentic” AI.
But by January 2025, Benioff told Bloomberg that Salesforce’s AI agents were doing 50% of the company’s work.
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“All of us have to get our head around this idea that AI could do things, that before, we were doing, and we can move on to do higher-value work,” he added.
That September, Salesforce cut 4,000 customer service jobs, and when Benioff appeared on the Logan Bartlett podcast, he did not mince words, saying, “I need less heads.”
AI’s increasing capabilities have made the company more efficient, but they have not made it more profitable. In fact, Salesforce’s shares lost 20% of their value in 2025 amid weaker-than-expected revenue guidance and slowing growth.
In February 2026, Salesforce laid off another 1,000 employees, this time making “strategic” cuts across marketing and data analytics.
To appease investors, the company announced a $50 billion share buyback that month and is funding the repurchase by selling $25 billion of its debt.
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