Nathalie Scardino

Long-time readers will know that one of diginomica’s most important maxims is that the best evangelists for enterprise tech are users. Yes, talk about all the great things that your new technology can do in theory, but what we really need to hear about is the story from those who are actually putting it into action.

With every technology revolution there is going to be a transitional phase between the slides of the sales and marketing deck and the ‘war stories’ from the user frontline. We can see this at the moment with the focus on agentic AI, perhaps none more so than at Salesforce, where CEO Marc Benioff has stated emphatically:

We believe that our computer scientists have delivered something that’s extraordinary, but it doesn’t matter until customers use it and get value from it. It just doesn’t matter.

While there are some impressive Agentforce use cases in the public domain – from Heathrow Airport through retailer Saks Fifth Avenue to recruitment giant Adecco Group – Salesforce set out to eat its own proverbial dog food when it comes to the agentic shift. This has most notably centered on its help.salesforce.com customer support function as Benioff explained in December last year:

Help.salesforce.com has always been our primary customer support site. It’s where our customers go to get help on Salesforce answers. Run by our Service Cloud, it does about 32,000 interactions with customers every single week. And behind help.salesforce.com are of course, our thousand of support agents that provide them the kind of quality support that’s needed, that help.salesforce.com was not able to provide.

Of the 32,000 conversations, prior  to Agentforce, around 10,000 would be escalated to human agents, but that total has been halved, with only 5,000 now requiring human involvement while AI agents sort out the remaining queries.

HR’s turn 

Now, as Salesforce launches Agentforce for HR Services, the company’s Chief People Officer Nathalie Scardino has lifted the lid on his the firm is using agentic tech to transform its own HR processes and practices. Benioff has famously said that he is among the last generation of CEOs who will be in charge of a human-only workforce. Scardino is on the front line of that move to a hybrid workforce of humans and agents:

Digital Labor is not just a technology transformation, it is really a talent transformation. When we think about digital workers and humans working together, I think about every wave of new technology that has expanded the eco-system and agents are unlocking unimaginable growth and opportunity…We’ll continue to see org structure changes, we’re not just talking about opportunities for employers, but also massive transformation for employees.

At Salesforce, Scardino’s team has identified what it sees as the Top Ten skills needed for a Digital Labor world – a combination of human skills, agent skills, and business skills:

We are on a mission to ensure that every employee at Salesforce is skilled up and re-skilled on AI and agents, and also understanding how to work with agents, onboarding, collaboration, where best to use the agent in your series of tasks. How do you know that an agent is performing? All of those are critical now to the future of agent skills and, of course, business skills. We talk a lot about the beginner’s mind at Salesforce, and I think now, more than ever, the ability for every employee to have creative thinking and interpreting data will be fundamental to the skills needed. Our mission this year is that 80% of our entire workforce are trained and enabled on these top ten skills that we’ve identified.

As well as identifying those target skills, the Salesforce HR team is focused on bringing employees along on the journey of this digital workforce transformation. This involves a framework built around three ideas – re-design, re-skill, and re-deploy. Scardino explains:

A year ago, we created a Workforce Innovation Team, and this team’s sole purpose in life is to understand what jobs will be re-designed, how we re-skill and ultimately, how we re-deploy our talent so that we continue to be an agile workforce serving our customers and employees.

Re-designing jobs is really looking at the foundational tasks of every role, she says:

I think about my world as an HR executive. We have a team of sourcers. We receive about 2 million applications a year to join Salesforce and we haven’t had the human bandwidth to be able to assess all of those applications and resumes. We’re now leveraging agents at the very top of the funnel to help us do that. 

Re-skilling is really where we’re spending a lot of our time and focus, re-skilling everybody to be an Agentblazer and then re-deploying that talent with tools like Career Connect, which is our internal talent marketplace. In Q1 alone, half of the roles that we filled were through internal applications.

Changing roles

The re-deployment of roles is one of the most interesting impact areas of agentic tech. Salesforce itself has cut back on its need for new engineers this year, but that doesn’t mean that AI-related opportunities aren’t opening up elsewhere in the company – and these can be open to internal as well as external candidates, Scardino explains:

There is a convergence of skills in a way that actually really democratizes access to new roles. We’re seeing that with our re-deployment initiatives, where people are moving from our Customer Success teams into Sales functions or into our software engineering functions. When you’re bringing employees along on this journey, understanding that career opportunities, learning experiences, are limitless in an agent-first world because of the convergence of these types of skills is important. So re-deployment is foundational to us, and the opportunity, again, to move quickly and to have an agile workforce is a re-deployment imperative.

Those all-important ‘war stories’ are coming through, she says:

One of the stories that I heard was one of our employees, who had an amazing background in change management, went through the Career Connect process, and it started to identify her skills for other jobs. And actually, this week, she started in the sales organization, because we’re surging our capacity there.. Now that we are assessing for skills that segue, that integration, that movement, we’re going to start seeing that more and more and more.

And when a person moves into a new role at Salesforce, whether a new recruit or a re-deployed employee, agentic tech is also transforming the all-important onboarding experience, adds Scardino:

The onboarding agent experience in Slack happens before you even get to your day one. The moment that we make an offer and that offer is accepted, our onboarding agent gets activated and starts to have very hyper-personalized reach out to the new incoming employee about your particular role or function.

The onboarding agent will also connect you, once you join, to people that have similar experiences to you. Navigating how work gets done as a new hire can be challenging and overwhelming, so having the onboarding agent be hyper-personalized on who can help you at the company, where do you need to go to find your benefits information, where do you go for day one, these are some of the onboarding enablement pieces that we’re seeing. The onboarding experience is just getting more and more personalized with agents.

My take

As Benioff himself notes:

We really start here. If we’re not eating our own dog food, we can’t really get at this point on another podcast, or have another meeting with another analyst or a reporter, or even show our face with a customer and say, ‘This is a great product, you should use this’. So this has been a huge priority that, number one, we’re using this.

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