HR leaders plan to redeploy nearly a quarter of their workforce in the near future as AI agents — which are capable of resolving complex issues independently — take on more routine tasks. As a result, HR leaders expect a productivity boost of 30% per employee.
These findings come from a new Salesforce survey of 200 global HR executives. Leaders also projected a staggering 327% growth in agent adoption within their organizations by 2027, spiking from just 15% adoption today to 64% within two years.
To fully capitalize on this shift, organizations must reimagine workforce development, said Nathalie Scardino, President and Chief People Officer at Salesforce. Businesses must facilitate human workers’ transition from task execution to AI supervision, cultivating crucial skills in leadership, strategic thinking, and human-AI collaboration.
Every employee will need to learn new human, agent, and business skills to thrive in the digital labor revolution.
Nathalie Scardino, President and Chief People Officer at Salesforce
“We’re in the midst of a once-in-a-lifetime transformation of work with digital labor that is unlocking new levels of productivity, autonomy, and agency at a speed never before thought possible,” Scardino said. “Every employee will need to learn new human, agent, and business skills to thrive in the digital labor revolution.”
Redeployment, not replacement
Roles that focus primarily on routine, predictable tasks may disappear as AI systems prove more efficient than human workers. However, most HR leaders plan to strategically redeploy their workforce rather than use AI agents to eliminate jobs.
While survey respondents expect most employees (61%) to continue in their current roles with AI sidekicks, they see nearly a quarter (23%) shifting to entirely new positions that better leverage their human talents. They’re putting money behind this belief. More than four in five CHROs (81%) are already (20%) or planning to (61%) reskill employees for new positions.
This paradigm shift creates substantial new responsibilities for HR leaders, who must now reimagine workflows, develop new training programs, and establish entirely new frameworks for how humans and AI collaborate.
Agentforce, Salesforce’s digital labor platform for deploying autonomous AI agents, can help organizations navigate this transition. Agentforce includes tools to create and customize agents that can help manage a digital labor force — analyzing attrition rates, skill inventories, and historical hiring trends to help organizations forecast talent needs.
The intent is to help build an agile workforce that we can invest in and move around as jobs shift and change with AI.
Ruth Hickin, Vice President of Workforce Innovation & Transformation at Salesforce.
And by incorporating tools like Salesforce Data Cloud, which brings together structured and unstructured data and metadata, HR teams can identify and respond to emerging skill gaps using internal performance metrics and external labor market data. This allows them to proactively develop talent acquisition strategies and personalized training paths.
“The intent is to help build an agile workforce that we can invest in and move around as jobs shift and change with AI,” said Ruth Hickin, Vice President of Workforce Innovation & Transformation at Salesforce.
Hickin also emphasized that human HR teams are still needed to manage these systems, maintaining the critical human element in decision-making. No matter how advanced AI becomes, she said, “We’ll always need human oversight, checks and balances, and contextual understanding that only people can provide.”
The human skills renaissance
The integration of agentic AI is creating entirely new job categories. Matt Fischer, President and COO of Bullhorn, a cloud computing company for the staffing and recruitment industry, already sees businesses restructuring their teams around these technologies.
“Customers need to think differently about their workflows and processes, not just trying to lift and shift what they do today,” Fischer said. “You’ve got AI workflow designers and process architects. You’ve got prompt engineers. You’ve got model architects who specialize in platforms like Agentforce to ensure organizations get the most from their AI implementations.”
Beyond technical roles, Fischer points to the increasingly critical role of support functions around content quality, data accuracy, and curation. As organizations scale their AI implementations, new specialists are also emerging to ensure these systems remain ethical, fair, and compliant with rapidly evolving regulations.
Indeed, 75% of CHROs believe AI will paradoxically increase the demand for distinctly human “soft skills.” Collaboration, adaptability, and relationship-building capabilities will become more valuable than ever in an AI-augmented workplace.
While it’s challenging to predict which skills will be most in demand as AI evolves, the enduring value of distinctly human capabilities seems certain.
“AI is just going to make human jobs even more human,” Hickin said.
Crucially, Fischer notes existing jobs will transform: workers will shift from direct task performance to supervising AI agents handling routine work. This fundamental change significantly impacts the workforce, demanding different skills — notably, more leadership than typical individual contributor roles require
“The individual contributor’s role now is being a supervisor of agents,” he said. “What makes a good supervisor? It’s leadership skills. It’s being able to be very adaptable and rapidly learn new things. It’s being proactive and data-oriented, observing what your agents are doing and knowing when you can add value as the human.”
These supervision skills aren’t typically part of entry-level or individual contributor training. Fischer emphasizes that organizations will need to develop comprehensive programs to help their teams transition to this hybrid human-AI working model.
In staffing and recruiting, this shift is particularly evident. The traditionally human-centered tasks of screening countless applicants and sourcing candidates can now be efficiently handled by agentic AI through voice screeners, chatbots, and automated assessment tools. Fischer sees Agentforce as particularly powerful in this arena, providing the infrastructure to deploy AI agents that complement human recruiters.
The result: fewer recruiters handling the same volume of work, but offering greater impact through uniquely human capabilities like judgment and relationship-building.
Another critical dimension is how AI and data analytics can help identify hidden talent and create new career pathways. More than half of HR chiefs say digital labor will increase employees’ career growth potential. Large language models (LLMs) can analyze resumes to uncover patterns and correlations in career progression, helping people discover alternative career paths they might never have considered.
This capability opens powerful new possibilities for reskilling and career mobility as the traditional job-title-based paradigm of recruiting gives way to a skills-based approach. This shift allows employers to identify transferable skills across seemingly unrelated professions, like recognizing how a barista’s attention to detail and customer service might make them an excellent candidate for a healthcare support role.
The AI-driven skills-based approach allows our customers to redeploy talent more effectively.
Matt Fischer, President and COO of Bullhorn
“The AI-driven skills-based approach allows our customers to redeploy talent more effectively,” Fischer said. “It allows them to differentiate, because they’re better at providing higher quality services. It’s not just about efficiency, it’s also about quality.”
The digital labor economy
Greg Shewmaker, CEO of r.Potential (a joint venture between The Adecco Group and Salesforce focused on optimizing human and digital labor), views this transformation as fundamentally reshaping the human labor economy as an increasing portion shifts to digital labor.
I think AI agents are going to be the next labor economy.
Greg Shewmaker, CEO of r.Potential
“I think AI agents are going to be the next labor economy,” Shewmaker said. “The skills that are going to be most valuable going forward are what we today call soft skills but will soon become essential skills.”
Shewmaker continued: “Every leader on the planet is looking for more people who can adapt when plans go awry and maintain a positive attitude.”
Executives across industries recognize the importance of agentic AI but often lack a clear implementation strategy. They face mounting pressure from competitors adopting these technologies, from customers expecting AI-enhanced services, and from their own organizations looking for direction. This widespread uncertainty is precisely why frameworks for managing the transition to a blended human-digital workforce have become so critical.
“Business leaders are under pressure to navigate their organizations through growing uncertainty and complexity,” Shewmaker said. “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.”
The path forward
Organizations that proactively plan for redeployment and reskilling will be best positioned to thrive. Yet the research shows that 85% of businesses have yet to implement agentic AI, and 73% of employees remain unclear about how digital labor will impact their daily work.
This awareness gap underscores the urgent need for robust communication and change management strategies to accompany technological implementation.
“There’s a sense of fear around AI coming in, so you have to be transparent with your employees that things will change, but support them on that journey,” said Hickin. “The best change will happen when people feel a sense of autonomy and agency in changing their own jobs and experimenting with tools themselves.”
More information:
- Dive deeper into the HR leader research and find more data about agentic AI on the Salesforce Stat Library
- Read about Salesforce’s strategy for agentic AI adoption
