In 2025, the focus shifted from the potential of generative AI to the workforce transformation of AI agents. Across every industry and region, Salesforce research this past year shows that CEOs, CFOs, CIOs, and CHROs are no longer questioning AI’s place in the workplace. Instead, the conversation has shifted to a much bigger challenge: how AI agents will overhaul the way their entire companies operate.
Here’s where these leaders are aligned, where they’re not, and takeaways from executives on the ground:
1. No longer just experimental, AI agents are now a core growth strategy
For many companies, AI has traditionally meant efficiency and speed. In 2025, that framing started to shift. A growing segment of the C-suite now view AI agents as a way to drive revenue and ensure competitive advantage.
- CIOs moved into deployment at scale. Full AI implementation jumped from 11% to 42% year-over-year (a 282% increase), and CIOs say AI budgets have nearly doubled — with 30% of AI budget now dedicated to agentic AI.
- CFOs moved from caution to committed capital. The share of CFOs reporting a conservative AI strategy fell from 70% (2020) to 4% (today). CFOs also report allocating 25% of their total AI budget to AI agents.
- CEOs framed agents as competitive necessity. Two-thirds (67%) say implementing agents is critical to compete in the current economic climate, and 65% say they’re looking to AI agents to transform their business model entirely.
“The introduction of digital labor isn’t just a technical upgrade — it represents a decisive and strategic shift for CFOs,” said Robin Washington, Chief Operating and Financial Officer, Salesforce.
2. The future workforce is humans with agents, rewriting leadership roles and skills
2025 was the year executives started describing AI not as a technology shift, but as a workplace shift. Agentic AI is forcing changes in what it means to not only work, but lead, in this new era.
- CEOs anticipate blended workforces. Most (80%) expect humans and AI agents to work together. Nearly three-quarters (72%) believe that within five years, most employees will have an AI agent reporting to them.
- CIOs say their job expanded, fast. Almost all (94%) of CIOs say scaling AI is forcing them to expand their skill sets.
- The top skills CIOs report improving to prepare for agentic AI are leadership (61%), storytelling/narrative-building (57%), and change management & communication (55%).
- CHROs say the “must-have” skill is not purely technical. CHROs identify AI literacy as the number one skill workers need as businesses move into the agentic economy.
- Reskilling is becoming the default plan. Four in five (81%) of CHROs are already reskilling (20%) or plan to reskill (61%) employees for roles with better, more relevant future job opportunities.
“The research indicates that the current generation of leaders will be the last to manage human-only workforces,” said Greg Shewmaker, CEO of r.Potential, a Salesforce customer. “Business leaders are under pressure to navigate their organizations through growing uncertainty and complexity. We are at a pivotal moment for the future of work, which depends on embracing AI adoption with a solid framework for human-AI agent collaboration.”
3. Trustworthy data and governance are the top bottlenecks
If 2023 and 2024 were about access to AI models, 2025 was about access to trusted enterprise context. Executive respondents were blunt: the limiting factor is no longer whether to bring AI into workflows — it’s whether the organization can safely connect AI to the data and processes that actually run the business.
The signal is strongest from CIOs and CFOs:
- CIOs worry trust impedes adoption. They cite data security, data privacy, and trusted data as top three fears regarding AI adoption.
- For CFOs, security/privacy threats keep them up at night. Two-thirds, (66%) say these threats are their top AI concern.
“As companies move toward becoming agentic enterprises, true transformation happens when data and AI move in lockstep,” said Michael Andrew, Chief Data Officer, Salesforce. “Strong data foundations give AI the context it needs, and AI, in turn, helps leaders unlock the full potential of their data. The organizations treating data and AI as an integrated strategy are the ones who will successfully move from pilots to execution to see AI deliver significant impact.”
4. The C-suite is not always in lockstep about where AI agents will drive most impact across the workforce
One of the most important dynamics found in the surveys: leadership teams are not uniformly aligned on which roles AI agents will transform most.
- CIOs are squarely focused on customer service teams: Nearly two-thirds (65%) of CIOs say they are working more closely with their customer service organization as a result of agentic AI – more than all other groups.
- CHROs say they need to reassign employees to technical roles: CHROs plan to reassign employees to technical roles, like data scientists or technical architects, in the near term.
- CEOs see AI agents having the biggest impact on marketing and operations: Fully prepared CEOs are 85% more likely to see marketing as highly impacted by digital labor and 37% more likely to see operations as highly impacted.
“Strong storytelling skills have empowered me to leverage information from cross-functional teams to tie together a tighter agentic AI story. It helps in getting and earning alignment across the C-suite, because we are all involved in the successful integration of agentic AI into our business.” – Chris Campbell, CIO of DeVry University
More information:
- Read IDC Research: CEOs on Agentic AI Preparedness
- Check out From Caution to Core Strategy: New Study Shows CFOs Going All In on AI
- Find out why, as AI Adoption Skyrockets 282%, Trust Becomes the New Bottleneck
- Discover why HR Leaders to Redeploy a Quarter of Their Workforce as Agentic AI Adoption Expected to Grow 327% by 2027
Methodology
This article synthesizes four 2025 Salesforce research reports: an IDC survey of North American CEOs (103 U.S., 52 Canada) fielded in June 2025, a global CFO survey (261 CFOs across 24 countries), a global CIO survey (200 CIOs across 24 countries), and a global CHRO/HR leader survey (200 HR leaders).
