Dreamforce 25 - AI, meet HR! Salesforce Chief People Officer Nathalie Scardino explains how agents change everything

Be careful what you wish for! For as long as I’ve been in and around the enterprise tech game, I’ve heard a common lament from Chief HR Officers (CHROs) across industries, namely that if only they didn’t have to focus on routine process and paperwork and admin minutiae as a core part of the day job, then they could be sitting at the boardroom table making a more strategic contribution to the overall growth of the business.

Well, the rise of agentic tech might well be calling HR’s bluff in this respect. If an agent can take all those mundane routine tasks off your hands, then that does indeed finally set you free to shine, doesn’t it? At which point the question becomes, are you and your peers actually ready in practice to step up to the mark to deliver on what you’ve been promising impotently for so long?

If you check out diginomica’s latest Executive Intelligence podcast, with Greg Shewmaker, CEO of advisory firm r.Potential, his blunt assessment is that HR isn’t ready for what the agentic revolution has to offer. On the other hand, Salesforce’s Chief People Officer Nathalie Scardino appears more enthused when I put the question to her:

Yesterday, for the first time at Dreamforce, we had a CHRO summit, because the role of HR now is to remove that bureaucracy, and it starts in your own organization. For us, we moved more to kind of this product mindset, where everything that we produce, whether it's Employee 360, Career Connect, is about removing that friction.

I think HR has this massive opportunity to do that in a way that maybe it hasn't before because of the emergence of this new workforce transformation. It's why I feel so deeply about the role of the HR executive in in the whole agent/human collaborative workforce. It is a duty, I think, of HR, to make sure that they're leading from the front. And I do think, from the summit that we had yesterday, everybody is thinking this. Every role has a level of bureaucracy to it, of paper-pushing, that should be eradicated immediately, because who has time for that? We have to focus on what's the most important, and that’s driving growth and innovation and for us being the best place to work, so retaining the best and brightest.

Agentic adoption

Of course this does then beg the question of how enterprises should introduce agentic tech into the HR process and the whole issue of adoption by or resistance from users? There are precedents here involving other new tech, suggests Scardino:

It wasn't like we came into work and said, ‘Hey, who wants to use email?'. It's not a question, right? It's a transformation that you have to do and it's the same on the AI front. Every single job, all of us, every job is being re-designed. We have a workforce innovation team, and we did a lot of research with the World Economic Forum, with our partners at LinkedIn, and really thought about a framework that we call the four R's.

The first R is re-design, she explains:

Every job, fundamentally at the task level, is re-designed with AI. And then you have to consider, once you understand that baseline, how do you re-skill? That has been our huge push internally. Publicly, we've talked about re-skilling a million Agentblazers. Everybody in our company is an Agentblazer champion, but you couldn't get an invite to our last executive management meeting without being...hands on, keyboard building agents. So re-skilling is this constant, learning being the meta skill for everybody.

Next up is re-deployment:

A lot of work roles are starting to merge. There are synergies between skill sets because of the access to technology, because the agent is taking an action.

Finally there’s re-deploying your talent and re-balancing within a digital workforce as the final elements of the framework.

Learnings

There are some key learnings that have emerged from all this, says Scardino:

We know that the more high-performing teams, the most innovative teams also, are the most engaged. What drives that engagement is that they have access to tools that they test, that they iterate. So there's a direct correlation between whether your manager is leveraging AI and your engagement and your trust, because it's the ambiguity where the disconnect comes in.

The implications for introducing AI adoption into HR are clear:

It's not like we're instantly going live with everything. We work really closely with our Chief Digital Officer and the Office of Ethical and Humane Use of Technology, and we figure out, where do we want to test, where do we want to pilot, and what is the feedback based on on the experience?

In fact, Scardino argus that HR has fundamentally changed already:

I now have a Workforce Innovation team that I didn't have 12 months ago on the consciousness around ethics. I actually see that as [being] an ‘everybody responsibility’. We have this Governance Council around, just because you can, should you?

She cites the example of recruitment as a case in point:

We have an agent in the recruiting function, but it is looking at all of our job applications. It is not making the hiring decision. We had this core principle three years ago that we would never leverage AI to make a hiring decision. So I think having these principles up front [is important]. What are the non-negotiables? Non-negotiables are the ethical use and deployment of AI for good.

As to fears about the potential negative impact on jobs of AI, Scardino argues that with any technological advancement, there is a period of uncertainty:

There was a time when spreadsheets came out, we thought there'd be an eradication of accountants. It's the opposite. We have more of them, but they're doing higher value work. So for us, the first thing began around everybody being an Agentblazer, top down, bottoms up. It doesn't matter your level or function, everybody is required to gain these AI fluency skills from a accreditation standpoint.  Irrespective of your role, understanding the data architecture is a core skill, no matter what function you're in. On skills, what we determined about eight months ago is we align around our top 10 enterprise skills, where every single employee would have access to tools like Trailhead through to hands on keyboard learning.

And AI will also bring about new roles to manage, she argues:

There are net new jobs that we have today that we didn't have even six months ago. You know, Ethical AI Architects, Prompt Engineers, Agent Manager, Supervisors in Conversational UI design, Agent Designers. Talent Management in my own org is now somebody that's supporting agent and human workforce collaboration. We have business skills. You have the very human skills - self awareness, emotional intelligence, creativity - and then agent skills, which is your AI literacy and your data literacy. So with Career Connect, which is our internal talent marketplace, we have focused aggressively on ensuring that every single employee has access to these Top 10 skills.

My take

Change is the only constant and what seems like sound thinking at one point can rapidly come to seem out of date. Scardino jokes:

My business dissertation in 1999 was on whether the Body Shop PLC should go online...and I thought I was cutting edge then.

The role of HR in the agentic age is an evolving debate. By the time Dreamforce 2026 comes around, everything may have moved on again as adoption levels increase and the realities of managing a Digital Labor workforce kick in.