Salesforce, the global leader in customer relationship management software, is undergoing a seismic shift in its leadership and workforce as the enterprise software sector faces mounting challenges from the rapid advance of artificial intelligence. On February 10, 2026, Salesforce announced a sweeping overhaul of its senior leadership team, hiring or promoting six new executives to replace five high-profile leaders who are stepping down, according to Business Insider. This shakeup comes at a time when the broader SaaS (Software as a Service) industry is grappling with both technological disruption and volatile investor sentiment.
Among the most notable departures is Adam Evans, the previous head of Agentforce—the AI-driven platform that CEO Marc Benioff once described on CNBC as “the core of every product we make now.” In a December 2025 interview with Business Insider, Benioff even mused that Salesforce could be renamed Agentforce, underscoring the platform’s strategic significance. Evans announced his exit in a LinkedIn post, stating he was “returning to what I love most: building startups.” To fill his shoes, Salesforce tapped Joe Inzerillo, formerly the company’s Chief Digital Officer, to lead Agentforce into its next phase.
Other key appointments include Patrick Stokes as the new Chief Marketing Officer, replacing Ariel Kelman—who has moved on to AMD as President and Chief Marketing Officer—and Iain Mulholland, who joins Salesforce as Chief Security Officer from Google Cloud. These leadership changes are unfolding as Salesforce eliminates roughly 1,000 roles across its marketing, product management, data analytics, and Agentforce teams, Business Insider reports. This follows a previous round of cuts in September 2025, when the company laid off 4,000 customer support workers, a move CEO Marc Benioff attributed to advancements in AI capabilities.
“I was able to rebalance my headcount on my support. I’ve reduced it from 9,000 heads to about 5,000, because I need less heads,” Benioff told the Logan Bartlett Show. “If we were having this conversation a year ago and you were calling Salesforce, there would be 9,000 people that you would be interacting with globally on our service cloud, and they would be managing, creating, reading, updating, deleting data.” Now, Benioff says, “50% are with agents, 50% are with humans.” These comments highlight how AI agents are fundamentally reshaping the nature of work at Salesforce, automating routine customer support functions and reducing the overall need for human staff.
Salesforce is hardly alone in recalibrating its workforce in response to the AI revolution. Amazon confirmed in January 2026 that it is cutting more than 16,000 jobs—on top of the 14,000 eliminated in 2025—as part of efforts to streamline operations. In a company blog post, Beth Galetti, Senior Vice President of People, Experience and Technology at Amazon, explained, “As I shared in October, we've been working to strengthen our organisation by reducing layers, increasing ownership and removing bureaucracy. While many teams finalised their organisational changes in October, other teams did not complete that work until now.”
Workday, another major SaaS player, also announced plans to reduce its workforce by about 2%—roughly 400 jobs—in 2026, according to Bloomberg. CEO Carl Eschenbach, who stepped down on February 10, 2026, to be replaced by cofounder and former CEO Aneel Bhusri, told employees, “We have so much opportunity ahead of us, especially with the potential of AI, and we have a strong foundation to build upon.” Workday is automating tasks for workforce management and developing predictive analytics for talent retention, signaling a broader industry pivot toward AI-driven operations.
The SaaS sector’s turbulence isn’t limited to layoffs and leadership changes. As Fortune’s Jeremy Kahn observed, investor sentiment has swung wildly in recent weeks, with the market initially punishing SaaS stocks amid fears that AI foundation models might render traditional software obsolete—wiping roughly $2 trillion off market value at one point. Yet, just days later, optimism returned and the S&P 500 rebounded to near record highs, though SaaS vendors saw only modest gains. This volatility, Kahn suggests, reflects a fundamental uncertainty about how AI will reshape the software landscape: “Investors like a simple narrative. The enterprise AI race right now is more like a Russian novel.”
Much of the anxiety stems from the rise of powerful AI agents from companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, which are now directly competing with SaaS vendors’ own AI agent offerings. Anthropic’s Claude Cowork product, for example, is seen as a serious threat to Salesforce and Microsoft—not because it eliminates the need for SaaS software, but because it can automate workflows and potentially reduce the number of human employees required, thereby shrinking the market for seat licenses. “It could be that Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google come to dominate the top layer of the agentic AI stack—building the agent orchestration platforms that enable big companies to build, run, and govern complex workflows,” Kahn writes. Still, he notes, “the SaaS incumbents say they know best how to run the orchestration layer because they are already used to dealing with cybersecurity and access controls and governance concerns and because, in many cases, they already own the data which the AI agents will need to access to do their jobs.”
In response to these threats, SaaS companies are rethinking their business models. Salesforce has introduced the “Agentic Enterprise License Agreement,” offering customers a fixed-price, all-you-can-eat access to Agentforce. ServiceNow and Microsoft are experimenting with consumption-based and value-based pricing for their AI agent products, moving away from the traditional per-user licensing model. As Kahn points out, “With these new business models, tech vendors likely don’t get to enjoy as much of this unnecessary spending” from customers who pay for more licenses than they use. The upshot: SaaS isn’t over, but it’s not poised for unchecked growth either. The fates of different companies are likely to diverge as the market sorts out winners and losers.
Meanwhile, the AI revolution is bringing broader challenges and opportunities. Goldman Sachs, for instance, is deploying Anthropic’s Claude agents to automate trade accounting and client onboarding, aiming to boost efficiency without immediate job cuts, as reported by CNBC. Amazon is reportedly planning a content marketplace for publishers to sell to AI companies, reflecting the growing demand for licensed data to train AI models. The White House is even considering voluntary restrictions on data center construction to mitigate the impact on power grids and consumer energy bills, according to Politico.
Yet, as AI becomes more deeply embedded in business operations, new research is challenging assumptions about its impact on workers. An eight-month study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, found that generative AI tools often intensify work rather than reduce it. Employees complete tasks faster but face higher expectations, broader responsibilities, and increased cognitive load, leading to burnout—a finding published in the Harvard Business Review.
In this climate of rapid change, the only certainty is uncertainty. As AI agents become more sophisticated and SaaS companies adapt their offerings and pricing, the industry’s future will depend on how well it can balance automation, human expertise, and evolving customer needs. For now, all eyes are on Salesforce and its peers as they navigate this new frontier.