Salesforce has cut jobs across Tableau, Trailhead, community engagement, and events. It is the third round of layoffs at the company this calendar year.
Salesforce has not confirmed how many people were affected. Plenty of them have posted about it on professional networking sites, and those posts point to cuts across events, community management, Trailhead, Marketing Cloud, and Industries Cloud teams.
Sources suggest a substantial portion of the North American Tableau technical support team, many of them remote employees, may have been affected. How far remote positions were disproportionately targeted is still unclear.
Impact on community and events
This round appears to have fallen hardest on remote staff and on roles in community advocacy, content creation, and event management. It lands while community sentiment is already shifting and Salesforce is taking criticism over its event strategy, with some ecosystem members pointing to an overemphasis on its own AI product, Agentforce, and what they see as a decline in general community engagement.
Pressure from activist investors is the likely driver, pushing Salesforce to reassess the return on investment for everything from product development to event spending, even at the potential cost of community morale.
Broader industry context
Globally, the tech sector has passed 125,000 layoffs this year, more than the whole of last year with four months still to go. Rapid progress in AI and the uses people expect to find for it is part of this, as are shifting expectations from customers and investors about the future of SaaS companies.
Decisions made for efficiency and against targets tend to push other business functions down the priority list, and that pattern has repeated across the industry's layoff cycles.
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