• Salesforce is set to begin mass hiring again, with 3 300 new employees earmarked to join its sales, engineering and data cloud product divisions.
• This is after firing 8 000 members of its workforce in January in response to the global economic situation.
• It also shifted its focus to generative AI and recently launched Einstein 1 – an AI model that can be used across Salesforce’s products.

Global vendor of customer relationship management (CRM) software Salesforce has begun a new hiring spree, just nine months removed from laying off around 8 000 of its employees.

According to a report from Reuters, Salesforce is now set to hire 3 300 new employees across various departments in a bid to “grow the company and to continue to achieve great margins,” says chief executive Marc Benioff.

The hires will apparently be split among the sales, engineering and data cloud product divisions at Salesforce.

In January the company announced that it would cut 10 percent of its workforce or around 8 000 jobs. According to the New York Times, these cuts were a reaction to the global economic downturn.

“We hired too many people leading into this economic downturn we’re now facing, and I take responsibility for that,” Benioff is quoted as saying at the time.

“The environment remains challenging, and our customers are taking a more measured approach to their purchasing decisions,” he added. In total Salesforce manages a workforce of around 80 000 people worldwide.

In response to the economic slowdown that has gripped the tech industry, and that has led to hundreds of thousands of individuals losing their jobs, Salesforce focused on rolling out software that leverages generative artificial intelligence. It also continued its focus on data and its bread and butter CRM software.

Earlier this month the company announced its Einstein 1 platform, which comes with the Einstein Copilot AI assistant.

“A new and trusted out-of-the-box conversational AI assistant built into the user experience of every Salesforce application. Einstein Copilot will drive productivity by assisting users within their flow of work, enabling them to ask questions in natural language, and receive relevant and trustworthy answers that are grounded in secure proprietary company data from Data Cloud,” details a Salesforce press release sent to Hypertext.

Einstein is the company’s generative AI model, built using OpenAI’s GPT framework. With Einstein Copilot customer companies can use its chatbot services across its suite of apps, including Slack and Tableau.