Human-AI Partnership: Salesforce’s Blueprint for the Future Collaborative Workplace

Editor’s Note: This article is a collaboration between Paula Goldman, Chief Ethical and Humane Use Officer, Lori Castillo Martinez, EVP of Talent Growth & Development, Becky Ferguson, SVP of Philanthropy, and Leah McGowen-Hare, SVP of Trailblazer Community & Global Workforce Development

Companies around the world are discovering the immense value of AI agents, not as replacements, but as powerful augmentations to their human workforce. These digital workers operate 24/7, handling tasks from the mundane to the complex, and are poised to dramatically increase productivity by an anticipated 30% within the next two years as adoption jumps by 327%, according to Salesforce research.

In centering our efforts across our people, product, and community, we’re committed to promoting a future workplace where humans can thrive with AI.

At Salesforce, we recognize both the opportunities and risks posed by widespread adoption of digital labor. That’s why we are focused on internal AI adoption and upskilling of our employees, building trusted, human-centered agentic AI, and investing in AI within our broader ecosystem. In centering our efforts across our people, product, and community, we’re committed to promoting a future workplace where humans can thrive with AI.

People: Skilling employees and driving internal AI adoption

We’re preparing our workforce for the digital labor revolution by investing in our most valued asset — our people — and harnessing the potential of agentic AI in career transformations.

AI Skilling

• Career Connect: Our AI-powered internal talent marketplace, Career Connect, gives employees personalized recommendations for skilling, learning on Trailhead, stretch assignments, and even new job opportunities within the company based on their interests and aspirations. 
• Top Ten Skills: We’ve identified the top skills essential for success in the AI era, broken down into three categories — human, agent, and business skills. And, we’re making sure every employee has the time, tools, and opportunities to master them. Through assessments and personalized learning plans in Career Connect, employees can gauge their proficiency in these skills and access targeted resources to grow them. 
• Quarterly Agentforce Learning Days: Every quarter, we provide a day of Agentforce programming with tailored tracks and expert speakers to encourage employees to spend time learning how to use AI tools. A recent Agentforce Learning Day gave more than 12,000 employees dedicated time to developing new AI skills, with 64% of those employees saying they now feel more equipped to use agents.

AI Adoption

• Accelerating AI adoption and innovation: We embed Agentforce, Salesforce’s digital labor platform, into our internal workflows, projects, and teams, from finance and engineering to sales and beyond. To promote safe innovation, we provide a sandbox environment where teams can explore new AI technologies without risk to live systems, fostering a culture of curiosity and ongoing improvement. 
• Redefining the human-AI partnership: With agentic AI taking on routine and repetitive tasks, we’re freeing up employees to focus on higher-stakes, higher-impact work. For example, our security team uses Agentforce to detect and respond to incidents — saving more than 3,000 hours of manual work. As a result, security employees can shift to more strategic, cross-functional, and high-growth areas. Salesforce has supported these transitions through personalized learning opportunities and mobility pathways across the company.

Product: Building Agentforce with humans at the center 

The agentic AI future must be designed with trust and intention, as adoption hinges on user confidence. We’re embedding safeguards directly into Agentforce’s design to make it safe, ethical, and enterprise-ready. This approach ensures people remain empowered, informed, and in control as AI takes on more responsibility.

• Trust Layer and Agent Guardrails: We integrate safeguards like audit trails, toxicity detection, on- and off-topic classifiers, and data masking directly into our AI products. Additionally, guardrails serve to clearly define the boundaries in which agents operate and protect both the integrity of AI outputs and the privacy of sensitive information. This is what makes broad adoption possible, giving organizations the confidence to scale AI. 
• Trust Patterns: We’ve standardized trust patterns — built-in guardrails designed to improve safety, accuracy, and human empowerment — across our AI products. These design approaches help Agentforce operate within predefined scopes and maintain transparency at every touchpoint. For example, we’ve built in visible indicators when content is AI-generated, prompt structures that keep agents on-topic, and behaviors that trigger human review for complex cases. This clarity allows humans to delegate with confidence.
• Agentforce Testing Center: As we shift toward a future where AI takes on more tasks, organizations need reliable ways to test how agents will behave before deploying them in real-world workflows. The Testing Center allows teams to test Agentforce using synthetically generated data, ensuring accurate responses and actions — with monitoring capabilities for usage and feedback. 
• Employee Trust Testing: We leverage the diverse perspectives of our employees and Equality Group members to uncover unintentional biases in our AI systems. This Trust Testing expands upon our existing ethical product testing efforts to ensure our AI systems are not only robust but also align with Salesforce’s standards of ethical responsibility. By tapping our employees for this testing, we’re also helping them get more familiar and comfortable with the technology. 

Community: Investing in AI within our ecosystem

We believe that AI must be accessible to everyone. That’s why we’re investing in AI skilling, literacy, and opportunities across our broader ecosystem to bring our customers and community along on this transformation. Through online learning, certification programs, grants, and innovation accelerators that help nonprofits gain access to agents, we’re providing Trailblazers, nonprofits, and communities the tools they need to thrive in an agent-first world. 

• Agentblazer Status: To make AI learning accessible, we developed clear, curated learning paths on Trailhead, Salesforce’s free online learning platform, equipping Agentblazers with essential skills in AI fundamentals and hands-on experience with agentic technology and Salesforce’s Agentforce platform.
• AI for All: Our AI for All initiative provides premium Trailhead AI courses and AI certifications at no cost to anyone through the end of 2025. 
• Workforce Partner Program: Our Workforce Partner Program equips more than 100 global training providers, nonprofits, and educational institutions with Trailhead resources, certification prep, and best practices on skills-based training to prepare learners for human-AI collaboration.
• Salesforce Accelerator — Agents for Impact: We help purpose-driven organizations gain equitable access to trusted generative AI technologies. By providing flexible funding, pro-bono expertise, and technology to purpose-driven organizations, we’re empowering nonprofits to accelerate agentic AI solutions to help them meet their missions. Recognizing the urgent need to close a widening AI access gap, we’ve partnered with 38 nonprofits, providing $10.4M in new funding for organizations to harness the power of AI and agents for climate, education, and other key impact areas.
• Philanthropic Giving: Our AI grantmaking focuses on literacy and training, tools, and uses for AI. In 2024, we gave $23 million to education to help the AI generation unlock critical skills. This funding included grants to U.S. school districts and global education nonprofits.

The path forward

As we step together into the AI future, we recognize that no one has all the answers. But with our focus on people, product, and philanthropy, we can balance the excitement of agentic AI with the inherent risks to workers. We are committed to sharing our learnings as we go, and continuing to provide guidance to customers and stakeholders on how to prepare for this new era.

Go deeper:

• Read more on how Salesforce is reskilling employees for the digital labor era
• Find out why digital labor is set to reshape the enterprise