Why Salesforce is Reshuffling its Leadership Team

Salesforce is making major changes to its senior leadership team, according to a report from Business Insider. 

It says that the company has hired or promoted six new leaders to replace the five high profile leaders who have shared they will be leaving the company. 

These departures include Adam Evans, the previous head of Agentforce – the platform CEO Marc Benioff once described in an interview with CNBC as “the core of every product we make now”, going as far as to say the company could be renamed Agentforce during a December 2025 Business Insider interview. 

In a LinkedIn post, Adam shared he was leaving the company to return “to what I love most: building startups”. He will be replaced by Joe Inzerillo, who currently holds the role of Chief Digital Officer at Salesforce. 

Other high-profile appointments include Patrick Stokes as the company’s new Chief Marketing Officer – replacing Ariel Kelman, now President and Chief Marketing Officer at AMD – and Iain Mulholland as its Chief Security Officer, who joins from Google Cloud. 

How Agentforce is reshaping operations at Salesforce

These new appointments come at a time of significant change for Salesforce, with the company reportedly eliminating around 1,000 roles across its marketing, product management, data analytics and Agentforce teams, according to Business Insider.

Salesforce previously cut 4,000 of its customer support workers in 2025, with Marc saying these changes were due to advancements in the company’s AI capabilities. In these changes, some workers were redeployed to growth areas of the business, while other roles were not backfilled

On the Logan Bartlett Show, Marc said: “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.

“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.” 

While those same customer support interactions are taking place, Marc says “50% are with agents, 50% are with humans".

Further reductions in roles 

Salesforce isn’t the first company to reduce headcount in 2026. Amazon confirmed in January 2026 that it is cutting more than 16,000 jobs – after reducing its workforce by 14,000 in 2025 – as part of efforts to streamline operations. 

Beth Galetti, Senior Vice President of People, Experience and Technology at Amazon, wrote in a company blog post: “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 is also reducing its workforce in 2026, with reports from Bloomberg revealing the company plans to cut its workforce down by 2% – approximately 400 jobs – to invest further in AI capabilities. 

Carl Eschenbach, CEO of Workday, said in a note to employees: “We have so much opportunity ahead of us, especially with the potential of AI, and we have a strong foundation to build upon.”

The company is automating tasks for workforce management and developing predictive analytics for talent retention, as it looks to further implement AI in the way it operates.