Salesforce Cuts Jobs Again While Spending Billions on Deals and Buybacks

Record cash, record deals, and another WARN notice

Salesforce is cutting jobs again, the second formal round this year and the latest in a string of reductions as the software giant reshapes itself for the AI era. A Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification filed in California on Monday lists 86 positions eliminated at the company's Mission Street headquarters in San Francisco, with affected staff kept on payroll until August 7.theregister The cuts fell hardest on teams behind the Agentforce AI product, the MuleSoft integration tool, and Marketing Cloud, though one person familiar said the core Agentforce teams were spared.businessinsider Roles in Washington state and outside the United States were also affected.businessinsider

The timing is conspicuous. On the same day it filed the layoff notice, Salesforce announced a definitive agreement to acquire m3ter, a revenue-management software maker — the 13th acquisition it has unveiled in as many months.theregister The week before, it agreed to buy Contentful as part of a push toward a "headless" CRM that lets users reach Salesforce data inside apps like Claude, ChatGPT, and Slack.theregister

A buyback that dwarfs the savings

The reductions also sit awkwardly against a $50 billion share-repurchase authorization approved earlier this year, which the company is partly financing with long-term debt.theregister +1 In the first quarter of fiscal 2027, Salesforce returned $27.5 billion to shareholders.fortune CEO Marc Benioff used the May 27 earnings call to tout the company's strength, calling it "really an outstanding quarter" with "record revenue, record deals, and just incredible cash flow."theregister

Investors have been less buoyant. Salesforce shares have lost more than 30 percent of their value over the past year, dragged by fears that AI models and agents could erode demand for traditional software, including its flagship customer-relationship-management product.businessinsider The buyback is, in part, an answer to that skepticism.

The AI math behind the cuts

Salesforce frames the churn as right-sizing for a moment when AI is doing more of the work. Benioff has said AI is lifting engineering output without added headcount, and in November 2025 the company axed roughly 4,000 customer-support roles as automation absorbed the load.theregister Last month it reported that Agentforce had passed $1 billion in annualized revenue, evidence the strategy is generating sales even as it costs jobs.businessinsider

Yet adoption has lagged the hype. Reporting late last year found Agentforce usage was relatively low and its capabilities short of the company's demos.businessinsider With about 83,000 employees as of January, the latest 86-person cut is small in scale, but it underscores a widening gap at Salesforce between a workforce being trimmed and a war chest being spent on deals and stock.theregister