Cloud software giant Salesforce is looking to hire thousands of new salespeople to sell its AI tools to customers.

The company plans to hire 2,000 new sales representatives. CNBCIt cited CEO Marc Benioff's remarks at a company event on Tuesday. This doubles down on the hiring plans Benioff shared with Bloomberg last month. Benioff said Salesforce has already received 9,000 referrals for those 2,000 positions.

This increase comes just a few months before the company plans to release the second generation of its AI agent software in February.

Benioff recently said: TechCrunch's Equity podcast He said Salesforce expects more than a billion agents to work in the next 12 months. Regarding generative AI in general, Benioff added: “Nothing has excited me more at Salesforce, perhaps in my career.”