For $2 a chat, a new AI agent from Salesforce can answer questions from customers and schedule meetings — without a human being needed to supervise.
AI agent technology, which Salesforce announced earlier this week at its annual Dreamforce event, has the potential to disrupt tasks handled by human employees. Nearly three million people will be employed as customer service representatives by 2022, with the majority (66%) being women, according to Data USA.
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Salesforce knows that its new technology has the potential to replace what people used to hire. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said Tuesday that new AI agents are allowing companies to stop hiring new employees or “gig workers” during peak times, according to Bloomberg.
“We want to get billions from our agents and customers in the next 12 months,” Benioff said.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Adopting a hiring principle, then giving AI the job of filling the gaps, is a strategy used by other companies such as the “buy now, pay later” payment company Klarna.
Last year, Klarna simply decided not to hire – even to replace people who were leaving. Outgoing employees and AI-induced freezes have reduced Klarna from 5,000 employees last year to the 3,800 people it had at the end of August, without any layoffs.
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In late August, Klarna CEO Sebastian Siematkowski told the Financial Times that the company wants to reduce its workforce by up to 2,000 over the next few years in this way.
“It’s not just that we can do more with less, but we can do more with less,” he told the Financial Times.
Klarna is not the only company using AI to perform human tasks. In the next year, three out of five large companies in the US intend to use AI in everything from financial reporting to marketing campaigns, according to a June study from Duke University.
Goldman Sachs estimates that AI could change or impact 300 million jobs by 2030, affecting writing, translation, and customer services.
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