Salesforce (CRM) is planning further workforce reductions, according to a Wall Street Journal report. The company intends to cut an additional 700 jobs, coming about one year after the company laid off 10% of its staff. This latest round of layoffs represents a continuation of Salesforce's cost-cutting efforts.

Yahoo Finance's Seana Smith and Brad Smith break down the details, providing insights into the growing trend of layoffs in the tech sector.

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Editor's note: This article was written by Angel Smith

Video Transcript

SEANA SMITH: Salesforce, the latest tech giant to announce layoffs. This is according to a report from the Wall Street Journal. Now, the cuts will affect around 700 employees. And it comes just about a year after the company cut about 10% of its workforce in an effort to reduce costs. Now, Salesforce joining a long list of companies that have been forced to make this decision, as they look to rightsize their workforce. Now the list, including Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet. And by more specifically, when you take a look at Salesforce's business, yes, this pales almost in comparison.

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You never really want to discount any news like this. But just putting it in perspective for our viewers, I think, is a better way to put it here. This is 1% of the workforce compared to the cut that we got just about a year ago, which was 10% of the workforce. And since they initially embarked on this cost-cutting journey, we have seen the stock up just about 80% over the past year far outpacing many of its competitors.

So I think the fact that Marc Benioff continuing to make these types of strategic moves that he sees necessary, as a company further positions for growth that-- Benioff has told many times here at Yahoo Finance, just in terms of the optimism and the hype surrounding AI, and we know Benioff is a big believer in that, and he has said it time and time again, that it really has the opportunity to boost worker productivity, and also, revenue by as much as 30%.

BRAD SMITH: Yeah. There are 25 open jobs right now that match specifically artificial intelligence at this company. So you think about where that hiring is actually, perhaps, even going to backfill some of the jobs that are being cut at this point, as a pivot is clearly in play. We've heard that from multiple companies, whether that be Google, whether that be Microsoft, or Amazon, as you were mentioning a moment ago. All of them trying to figure out where they can put the best allocation of headcount and resources towards this next almost cloud-like moment for the industry here. Some have called it the smartphone moment. OK. That remains to be seen.

But if there's anything that we can almost guarantee that artificial intelligence will be in terms of a layer on for these companies, it is similar or analogous to the type of benefit that they saw from cloud. And that's expected. Even when you heard from SAP and some of the restructure that's taking place there, we talked about that earlier this week. Last time I had seen any type of headcount restructuring like that, they were bracing and-- not even bracing. They were gearing up for the cloud. And so, that's the next inflection point and making sure that they've got people in the right places in order to bring some of these solutions to life in the near term.