The Future of Work is Still Human: Learnings and the 4Rs to Building the Human + Agent Workforce

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.

When we hear AI and agents, it can be easy to picture a cold, robotic, machine-laden future and forget the humanity of it all. There is little doubt that we are in the midst of the most significant technology shift of our lifetime - on a scale we haven't seen since the Industrial Revolution. Everything we thought about how organizations operate is now antiquated as we begin to design for humans and agents working together.

The future is not distant - it's here now. As our Chair and CEO Marc Benioff so presciently said, "we are the last generation to lead a human-only workforce." He also reminds us this radical new way of working is not just a technology transformation, but a people transformation, with humans - us - at the center.

The future is not distant - it's here now.

So now our leadership challenge is how to reimagine every part of our business to become a truly agent-first enterprise. Eighteen months ago, we were faced with a critical question: how do we prepare our workforce for AI and autonomous agents? As we connect with our customers and other C-suite leaders, we hear the same questions - is this hype or reality, what will really change? How do I prepare my talent for this massive shift? When it comes to roles and org design, where do I even start?

Becoming Agentic by Design: It Starts with an AI Mindset

As an organization, we began surrounding ourselves with experts and conducting deep research to become agentic by design - meaning an agent-first experience - and answer these questions for our customers. It starts with building an AI mindset and here's what we discovered:

1. Learning is the new meta-skill, and we need to radically rethink work as we know it: Adopting a beginner's mind and becoming a continuous learner is critical to success in the agentic era. As company leaders, we need to be intentional about creating spaces for employees to learn, imagine, ask questions, and experience new tools, tailoring them to the different ways people learn. At Salesforce, we stood up quarterly Agentforce learning days, scale through our online learning platform, Trailhead, and employees self-organize through employee resource groups and Slack to learn together.
2. Use the tools: AI and agents must be in the flow of work. We've found one of the best ways to bridge confidence gaps with AI and agentic technologies, is to simply get started. In our workforce, that can look like agents in Slack helping our employees schedule meetings, connect to learning opportunities, translate data insights, and manager agents to improve team health. And this is just the beginning.
3. Engage, empower, include: We saw in our own employee survey data and research that employees who are more engaged, included, and supported are more likely to adopt AI and feel empowered to innovate. Focus on engagement and leverage critical employee moments to excite and inspire employees around the transformational technology moment we're in - and the role they play in the future.
4. Show the Impact: Help employees understand the "why," which becomes easier to show as you integrate the tools and drive adoption. In our recent research, we found daily AI users report increased productivity (64%), focus (58%), and job satisfaction (81%). Within our own organization, employees are creating value and opportunity - like AEs who are using Agentforce to offload research and admin to focus on bringing value to customers.

Once the mindset shift happens, we start to see that when AI and agentic technology is used right, it can augment human productivity, creativity, and purpose. Like with any technological revolution, the net increase in opportunity will outweigh the disruption - but how we get there is the key to unleashing our unlimited potential. Less than a year ago, Salesforce launched Agentforce, a digital labor platform to build and deploy agents, and support our customers in driving human and agent collaboration. Customers have already begun to experience the transformative impact - OpenTable handled 73% of all restaurant web queries with Agentforce in just three weeks after setup, Engie is assisting 83% of users with Agentforce, and Grupo Globo improved customer retention by 22% by using agents to identify new upselling opportunities and convert non-subscribers.

The 4Rs of Workforce Innovation Every Leader Can Use

We like to say we're customer zero of Agentforce - using our own technology to improve the experience for our customers. Similarly, we see ourselves as customer zero for the people transformation needed. This led us to create entirely new roles and teams that didn't exist a year ago. Our Workforce Innovation team is dedicated to supporting our business in thinking through and executing the transformation needed to lead in the agentic era. Through trial and error, constant learning, deep research, and collaboration across the business, the team created the "4Rs" Workforce Innovation framework to build the agentic enterprise:

• ​​Redesign how work gets done. Build the human-and-agent workflow. Augment human judgment and creativity with AI speed and scale. At Salesforce, we redesigned the customer support role to offload routine inquiries to agents, freeing our support teams to focus on deeper customer relationships. Today, our help site has handled more than 1 million customer requests autonomously.
• Reskill your people. Equip every employee with the skills needed to guide, lead, and scale with agents. Research shows human skills will be just as important as technical skills to be successful in the agentic future. We've identified the top 10. Our online learning platform Trailhead is available to anyone looking to reskill across human, business, and agentic skills.
• Redeploy talent to unlock agility. Move beyond static roles to enable people to flex, adapt, and focus on high-impact work. We launched Career Connect last year to understand what skills our employees had and match them to curated learning paths and newly identified roles connected to their unique skills. Career Connect is already helping us redeploy employees into new roles - in fact, 51% of our hires in the first quarter were internal.
• Rebalance work. Orchestrate the right partnership between agents and humans to ensure each does what they do best. Understand the outcomes with tools like Agentforce Command Center - a single pane of glass to observe agent performance, scale what works, and fix what doesn't.

In this critical leadership moment, it is important to be guided by values and to bring everyone along. We want to share the knowledge we've gained and best practices to help set up your organization to not just transform - but thrive and lead through the agentic era. In that spirit, we've developed a playbook with the 4Rs of Workforce Innovation and agentic design, anchored on the 4Rs. As Marc Benioff said, "humans must remain at the center of the story" and we can start writing it together.

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