How Salesforce Is Reimagining Its Workforce for the Agentic Enterprise

In 2023, Swedish fintech Klarna made headlines for replacing 700 customer service employees with AI - before changing its mind and hiring humans again less than a year later. Since then, there is growing evidence that AI is prompting companies to restructure and reinvest in, rather than reduce, their workforces. That has been the case at Salesforce, which is consciously transforming itself to fit the needs and opportunities of the agentic era. Over the last year, the company has redesigned workflows, reskilled its workforce, and redeployed and rebalanced its people to optimize human-AI collaboration.

"The Agentic Enterprise is not only a technology transformation," said CEO Marc Benioff. "When humans and agents work together, it radically transforms the structure of your company."

Reshaping, Not Reducing

Over the course of the last year, Salesforce has evolved nearly every part of its business with AI. Take its customer support function for example.

Since deploying Agentforce to answer customer support questions on help.salesforce.com a year ago, Agentforce has handled 2.6 million customer conversations and now resolves 63% of customer questions, with roughly the same customer satisfaction scores as human agents. In sales, an Engagement Agent now reaches out to incoming prospects, contacting tens of thousands of leads, booking hundreds of meetings, and uncovering millions of dollars in pipeline.

With agents autonomously handling this kind of routine work, Salesforce's service and sales teams can focus on more strategic duties like building deeper relationships with high-value accounts and closing complex deals. In fact, hundreds of employees have been redeployed to high-growth areas in the business, and the company is adding thousands of roles in sales and professional services, including forward deployed engineers that work hands-on with customers to develop custom AI solutions. The company is also hiring net-new roles like deployment strategists, AI conversation designers, and AI architects that didn't exist just months prior.

Over time, the size of the support team has shrunk through attrition and redeployment. But other functions have grown, ensuring that the overall workforce evolves to meet new demands. In fact, last year, Salesforce hired thousands more people to serve its growing business.

From Support Queue to AI Innovation

Zachary Stauber, who leads the Digital Success Data & AI Team, exemplifies this strategy. Stauber's team operates as the "AI Operations Team," responsible for strategy, design, and evaluation of Agentforce on Help.

When Stauber needed to double the size of his Evaluations team-a critical group tasked with analyzing the answer quality and conversation quality of AI agents -he didn't look externally. Instead, he looked within the existing support organization.

Stauber worked to identify support engineers who were good candidates for redeployment, from reactive troubleshooting into proactive forward-deployed engineer roles. Now they use their product expertise to ensure the AI is meeting business outcomes, focusing on high-value work like adoption and attrition prevention.

"Redeployment has been such a great opportunity," Stauber notes. "I have the ability now, as a leader and hiring manager, to tap into talent that might not have been available to me in the past" now that Agentforce is addressing the great majority of customer questions these employees used to answer. "These are candidates who have deep Salesforce knowledge, understanding of AI, and are willing to lean into a new and meaningful space for the business."

Blueprint for the Future

This initiative is part of Salesforce's ongoing effort to continuously reshape and rebalance its workforce to ensure agents and humans are working together most effectively. To support employees through the transition, the company has built tools like Career Connect, which identifies transferrable skills and new opportunities within the company.

"Agents are not about replacing people, they are about releasing us from the routine, the bureaucracy, the noise-and augmenting human productivity, creativity, and purpose," said President and Chief People Officer at Salesforce, Nathalie Scardino. "In this critical leadership moment, it's important to be guided by values and work to bring everyone along."

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