Why Does Salesforce’s Top Talent Keep Leaving?

When you’re a company as big as Salesforce, you’re bound to run into some attrition and restructuring. People come, and people go, and despite it all, the CRM giant is still over 83K people strong. 

However, over the last few years, Salesforce has seen some of its top talent step down, including its Co-CEO, head of Agentforce, and more. But where are they going, and is this movement enough to be considered a brain drain where top tech talent uses Salesforce as a springboard into more bountiful careers?

Bret Taylor: Where It All Started

It can be argued that this potential brain drain phenomenon really started back in 2022, when Salesforce Co-CEO Bret Taylor announced that he was stepping down from his position. This came after only one year in the role. 

Marc Benioff, Salesforce Co-Founder and Taylor’s Co-CEO at the time, had mentored Taylor for numerous years, including long before he joined Salesforce. However, his departure didn’t necessarily come as a surprise, as the Co-CEO was known to be a “serial entrepreneur”, having founded and sold multiple tech companies up to this point. His intentions were clear: he was going back to his entrepreneurial roots, and that he did, going on to found AI startup, Sierra.

Bye Bye Executives 

The loss of exec-level talent certainly did not stop there. In late 2023, Lidiane Jones, Slack’s CEO at the time, announced that she would be stepping down to become Chief Executive of the popular dating app, Bumble. Her departure came just a year after Jones took her CEO position at Slack, replacing current founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield.

Lidiane Jones was sequentially replaced by the next CEO in Slack’s lineup, Denise Dresser, until she too stepped down earlier this year, to become Chief Revenue Officer at OpenAI. Rob Seaman, Slack’s Chief Product Officer, has stepped in as the interim CEO of Slack following Dresser’s departure, prompting questions about what’s really going on on the executive level at Slack to have the CEO role rotate so frequently. 

Alongside Dresser’s move to OpenAI, the last few months have also seen the departure of Salesforce’s Chief Trust Officer, Brad Arkin, the CEO of Tableau, Ryan Aytay, and Salesforce’s EVP and GM of AI, Adam Evans. The CRM giant has been battling ‘Death of SaaS’ allegations for over six months now, making these losses all the more significant as Salesforce evaluates its role as both a SaaS provider and AI player.

All the aforementioned executives had their own reason for leaving – Arkin is now the Principal at strategic advisory company LeverSec, Evans, like Bret Taylor, has gone back to his entrepreneurial startup roots, and Aytay is now the President and COO of software development company Code Metal.

The Salesforce to Founder Pipeline

Typically, it appears that springboarding from a career in Salesforce to something else tech-related often goes one of two ways: you either take up another executive position at another tech company, or you found your own. 

Rohit Doshi, a Founding Account Executive, broke down the figures behind what Salesforce alumni have been up to since they left the Mothership, realizing that they have raised more than $8.8B in total company funding. 

“Salesforce was one of the first companies to prove that enterprise software could live in the cloud,” he wrote on LinkedIn. “For a decade, it attracted some of the sharpest people in tech – engineers, product leaders, salespeople, executives.”

“Many of them left and built companies of their own that later became household names.”

Some of the most notable names that Doshi picked out include former Salesforce product expert Howie Liu, who went on to be the CEO of Airtable, and former Salesforce Chief Strategy Officer Tien Tzuo, who is now the Founder and CEO of Zuora. 

The accomplishments of Salesforce’s female alumni are also significant, generating over $400M in company funding, though this figure is comparatively smaller. Doshi highlighted that the VC backdrop is “still tough”, with only around 28% of US VC deals in 2025 going to female-founded or female co-founded startups.

However, the women who have persevered in the face of these challenges have gone on to reap the rewards. This includes former Salesforce Account Executive Fengru Lin, who went on to found biotech company TurtleTree, and former Senior Director of Trust Engagement at Salesforce, Masha Sedova, who went on to found security company Elevate Security.

AI as the Bottom Line

Although many of the former executives covered in this post have left Salesforce to pursue a wide variety of tech disciplines, as artificial intelligence continues to grow as both a technology and an opportunity, we will likely see more leaders get snapped up by AI companies or move into AI-adjacent positions. 

Denise Dresser is a recent example, with her move to OpenAI. Clara Shih, Salesforce’s former AI CEO, who left in 2024, is another, going on to become the Founder of Business AI at Meta. The chances of this trend continuing appear to be high, too. 

A recent report from research firm Gartner revealed that acquiring and developing AI and “digital talent” is CFOs’ top near-term challenge, and tech recruitment agency Hays’ data shows that expertise in AI is the most sought-after specialist skill by tech employers today. In fact, employers are reportedly on the lookout for individuals who are proficient in transformation, projects, architecture, cloud services, and data and advanced analytics. 

This kind of demand also brings healthy salaries with it, with senior machine learning (ML) specialists and AI leads in London or AI-intensive sectors (e.g., fintech, healthtech) often earning over six figures, reflecting strong competition for top talent.

With AI playing such a critical role across a significant number of jobs in Salesforce now, landing an important, AI-oriented role at the Mothership could bring not only short-term success but long-term success too.

Tech companies will become increasingly eager to obtain the best of AI tech talent, likely offering appealing salaries and new challenges to tackle. Does this mean that Salesforce will always be used as a springboard to other ventures? Not necessarily, but having that kind of experience under your belt will definitely be something current and future executives will keep in mind for the future.

Final Thoughts

With all these former executives having left Salesforce over the years, does this mean that the SaaS leader has been experiencing brain drain? It’s hard to say. However, it does appear that many of the executives covered have used Salesforce as a stepping stone to other successful tech ventures that they perhaps would not have achieved as quickly or easily if they hadn’t worked with Salesforce initially.

Salesforce has certainly cultivated an admirable environment of entrepreneurship and the confidence to specialize in different areas of tech, so yes, it is possible that having Salesforce as a line on a resume helped many of these founders and execs, but perhaps the most important takeaway is the achievements themselves. 

It indicates that a lot of transferable skills are fostered at Salesforce, setting professionals up for success beyond their time at the company. In an era where a career at Salesforce has begun to become heavily questioned, this can definitely be seen as a win; even if Salesforce isn’t your end-goal, it could catapult you to bigger, better things.