Credit: Salesforce
Salesforce told officials in Washington and California it will cut 133 roles from 5 October, according to state filings. A Washington notice covers 59 jobs at its Bellevue and Seattle offices, with the other 74 at its San Francisco headquarters.
For the enterprise-software giant, it is the third such round this year.
The Washington filing is precise and unglamorous. The 59 terminations are permanent, effective 5 October, and, it stresses, do not stem from relocation or contracting out. The worksites stay open. The roles listed lean heavily on engineering: software and technical-support engineers, an SVP of software engineering, a product director, and a VP of sustainability.
Nobody in the filing mentions AI
What the paperwork does not mention is AI. That link comes from the top. Chief executive Marc Benioff has spent the past year crediting AI tools for efficiency gains, and Salesforce is pushing Agentforce, its AI-agent product, which passed $1bn in annualised revenue in May. This is not new. Last September it cut 93 Washington jobs while Benioff made the same case.
Whether the cuts flow from that automation or from ordinary restructuring, Salesforce has not spelled out. And the affected roles, weighted towards engineers rather than back-office staff, complicate the tidy story that AI is quietly clearing out routine work.
Not a company in trouble
The layoffs do not read as distress. Revenue growth has re-accelerated after six straight quarters below 10%, and 133 roles are a sliver of roughly 80,000 staff. In Seattle, Salesforce’s Tableau unit just renewed a 114,000-square-foot lease. This looks more like a reshaping than a shrinking.
The reshaping runs to the top. Benioff has promoted Miguel Milano, a former Oracle executive, to chief operating officer, while a longtime engineering chief, Srini Tallapragada, leaves after 14 years. Salesforce has also hired senior engineers away from Microsoft. It is rewiring its leadership even as it trims below.
The SaaSpocalypse backdrop
The mood in software is grim. Salesforce shares are down about 27% this year, caught in what the market calls the “SaaSpocalypse”: the fear AI will hollow out subscription-software firms. Not all are victims. Atlassian just soared on strong results. But the pressure to look leaner, not obsolete, sits on all of them.
Salesforce is not cutting alone. In the same week, Google and Zillow filed their own Washington layoffs. The through-line is an industry reorganising around AI in real time: promoting for it, hiring for it, and letting people go around it, while rarely saying so on the record.
Get the TNW newsletter
Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.
