Salesforce uses AI internal career coaches for Upskill employees

Brooke Grant worked as a change manager at Salesforce when the company's internal career agent pinched him on Slack to suggest an open role in the activation of sales.

“He said:” It is your career path “, but you also have these skills that are very interchangeable to these other paths,” said Grant in an interview with Business Insider.

Although Grant had no sales experience, she had skills in sales, AI and customer success for a few months before the opportunity. She said that the platform, which highlighted her transferable skills, had given her the confidence necessary to go.

Grant received the notification from Slack for the role opened in February and, in March, she started the new role.

While many companies are pursuing productivity gains, Salesforce adopts a broader approach to the adoption of AI by investing in AI internal career tools to help employees pivot new roles and skills.

Last year, Salesforce launched Career Connect, an internal talent market fueled by AI. Once users have created a profile, the platform infers skills according to their working history and helps employees create personalized career paths according to their skills and objectives, Salesforce told BI. The tool also helps the trend skills to follow up on Salesforce so that it can invest in targeted training, the company told BI.

The platform is also available in Slack via a version called Career Agent. Employees can go back and forth with the tool to obtain an exploitable overview to achieve their career objectives. Salesforce told Bi that employees can ask the agent of open career opportunities or how to develop competence. The tool fueled by the AI ​​recommends courses, relevant contacts and employment opportunities according to the user's interests.

Salesforce has fulfilled half of his roles internally in Q1

Salesforce Piloted Career Connect last year with 1,200 employees in its customer success teams, employee success and commercial technology. The company said that 74% of employees were active on the platform, connecting several times throughout the three-month driver. Just under 40% of participants signed up for courses and training suggested to them, said the company.

Grant is not the only employee to have succeeded with the career coaches of the AI ​​of Salesforce. During the first three months of the pilot, 28% of participants applied for jobs via Career Connect, and more than 90% of the roles filled by the participants were discovered using the platform, the company said.

The president of Salesforce and chief of people, Nathalie Scardino, also declared in a press briefing that with the career agent, the company had been able to fill half of his roles with internal requests in the first quarter of 2025.

Some of the career transitions that employees have made were not conventional. The management of Salesforce, Lori Castillo Martinez, told Business Insider in an interview that an employee recently used Career Connect to Transition to a cybersecurity role after spending 19 years as a human resources program director. Martinez said the platform connected the employee to a mentoring program with a person from the cybersecurity team, which encouraged him to continue the role.

“I hadn't even thought of cybersecurity as a way for some of our HR program managers,” said Martinez.

Prepare for transformation

Salesforce pushes these efforts, because the company has already seen changes in its workforce following the AI. The CEO of Salesforce, Marc Benioff, had previously announced a job freeze in 2025 on engineers following an increase in productivity of 30% among new tools.

Recent data also indicates that the transformation of the workforce will evolve more in the years to come. Salesforce published the results of a research study on Monday which interviewed 200 heads of school, the heads of human resources and other world HR leaders.

The study revealed that the Chros expect to redeploy 23% of the workforce in new teams or roles over the next two years. While 61% of the workforce should stay in their posts, the roles should change. About 80% of the chros interviewed provide for reskill employees for roles with better future opportunities.

“Each industry must rethink jobs, Reskill and redeploy talent – and each employee will have to acquire new human skills, agents and commercial to thrive in the digital work revolution,” said Scardino in a press release.