Salesforce Cuts 300 Jobs in Year’s Second Round of Layoffs

Salesforce reportedly cut about 300 jobs in July after eliminating 700 roles earlier this year.

The latest cuts are part of the company’s ongoing effort to streamline its operations, Bloomberg reported Monday (July 15), citing an unnamed source.

Without specifying the number of layoffs, a Salesforce spokesperson told Bloomberg: “Like any healthy business, we continuously assess whether we have the right structure in place to best serve our customers and fuel growth areas. In some cases that leads to roles being eliminated.”

At the end of January, the firm had 72,682 employees, according to the report.

When Salesforce laid off 700 employees — or about 1% of its workforce — in January, the cuts were made across the company, the Wall Street Journal reported at the time. 

The report suggested that because the company still had 1,000 jobs open, those cuts were a routine adjustment of the workforce and an effort to redirect spending to other areas.

Salesforce made a bigger adjustment in January 2023, cutting 8,000 positions — or 10% of its workforce — while pointing to a slowdown in customers’ buying.

“Our customers are taking a more measured approach to their purchasing decisions,” Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff wrote in a January 4, 2023, letter to employees.

The latest round of layoffs comes at a time when artificial intelligence (AI) is playing a role in recent tech sector job cuts.

Layoffs in the tech industry for the year exceeded 100,000 as of Friday (July 12), with a portion being attributed to companies shifting their focus to AI, Seeking Alpha reported Sunday (July 14), citing data from the tracker Layoffs.fyi.

On Tuesday (July 9), UiPath, a provider of AI-powered enterprise automation technology, said that it would lay off 10% of its global workforce of 4,200 as part of a restructuring aimed at managing its operating expenses.

“These changes reflect efforts to reshape the organization by streamlining the company’s structure, particularly in operational and corporate functions, better prioritizing our go-to-market investments and focusing our research and development investments on artificial intelligence and driving innovation across our platform,” UiPath said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).