Salesforce cuts staff amid acquisition spree and $50 billion share buyback

SaaS

The layoffs come after CEO Marc Benioff boasted of record revenue and 'incredible cashflow' two weeks ago 

Salesforce is undergoing another round of layoffs, its second this year, according to a filing with California’s Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification office. 

The notice filed on Monday stated that 86 employees would be laid off from its Mission Street office in San Francisco on August 7. We're not sure if these were the only jobs cut, and Salesforce did not immediately respond to an email to its press office seeking comment. The company employed about 83,000 people globally as of Jan. 31, according to its annual report. 

On the same day Salesforce filed its WARN notice, it announced a definitive agreement to acquire m3ter, a revenue management software company, for an undisclosed sum. This is the 13th acquisition that the company has announced in as many months. 

Just last week, Salesforce announced that it would acquire Contentful, which is part of the outfit’s plunge into a “headless” CRM where users can access Salesforce data and logic inside other applications such as Claude, ChatGPT, and Slack. 

It comes as the CRM giant is also buying back billions of dollars of its own stock under a $50 billion repurchase authorization approved earlier this year. The move follows a year in which Salesforce shares have lost more than 30 percent of their value. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff boasted about the company’s cash reserves during the most recent earnings call two weeks ago. 

“I think as everybody can see, this was really an outstanding quarter for Salesforce,” Benioff said during the May 27 Q1 FY2027 investor presentation. “We have delivered record revenue, record deals, and just incredible cash flow. And, of course, I think we've also returned record levels to our investors. We're going to talk about that and how important that is, especially during this unusual time.”

These layoffs, while small in size compared to earlier rounds of job cuts at the CRM leader, are the latest as the company struggles to right-size for the AI era. 

According to Business Insider, the job cuts this week fell hardest within Salesforce Agentforce teams, MuleSoft IT, and Marketing Cloud software. This is the second round of layoffs at the company this year, with Salesforce cutting under 1,000 jobs in January, according to Business Insider. 

Salesforce has undergone a number of workforce reductions in the last three years, with the largest coming in November 2025 when the company axed 4,000 customer support roles, which CEO Marc Benioff discussed on a podcast, saying he needed fewer heads. ®