From Adaptability to AI Literacy: Critical Skills Needed to Succeed in the Digital Labor Revolution

The rise of digital labor, with intelligent AI agents that augment human workforces, is fundamentally reshaping how businesses operate. As a result, jobs are changing — and the skills needed to be successful in those jobs are changing too. 

With just 15% of workers saying that they have the education and training necessary to use AI effectively — reskilling is more critical and urgent than ever. But what does that‌ look like for employers and employees? 

Top skills for the agentic AI future

At Salesforce, we’re focused on upskilling employees to bring them along in the digital labor revolution. Using millions of internal datapoints, industry research, and benchmarking from organizations like World Economic Forum, we’ve identified the top 10 enterprise skills that workers need to be successful in a future with agents, falling into three broad categories: 

• Human Skills — Adaptability, Accountability, Collaboration, Emotional intelligence
• Agent Skills — Agent and AI Literacy, and Human/Agent Collaboration
• Business Skills — Problem solving, Data interpretation, Creative thinking, Storytelling 

By identifying these foundational skills, we’ve created a framework to not only guide our own reskilling efforts at Salesforce, but also support our customers in helping their employees learn how to work alongside digital labor.

Reskilling in action 

We know it’s not enough to simply identify the skills. Businesses need to make reskilling an integral part of their workforce strategy, and create tangible ways to operationalize skills across the organization.

You can’t address what you can’t measure.

You can’t address what you can’t measure. So at Salesforce, we’ve set a goal to enable at least 80% of our workforce to adopt these skills by the end of 2025. To reach this lofty goal, we’ve created an infrastructure of training and technology tools to support our employees on this journey, including:

• Agentblazer Ranch: Opening this week, Agentblazer Ranch is a dedicated floor in our San Francisco headquarters designed to help employees solve business challenges and drive customer success using Agentforce, Salesforce’s digital labor platform for enterprises.  
• Career Connect: Last year, we introduced Career Connect, an internal AI-powered talent marketplace that gives employees tailored and personalized recommendations for skilling, learning on Trailhead, and even new job opportunities within the company. And, Career Agents provide actionable steps to help employees reach their career goals.
• Quarterly Agentforce Learning Days: Every quarter, we provide a day of Agentforce programming to encourage employees to spend time learning how to use AI tools and assistants. Most recently, we had more than 11,000 employees participate globally, with 76% of participants saying they now have a better understanding of our Agentforce strategy, and 64% saying they feel more equipped to use agents.
• Tuition Reimbursement: Employees are encouraged to get training and achieve certifications through accredited programs and organizations. In turn, Salesforce offers full and partial reimbursements for these programs.

This infrastructure will help our employees skill-up to work seamlessly with agents in the future. It will also help us reach our goal of empowering 1 million Agentblazers, Salesforce Trailblazers who are using Agentforce to further their AI initiatives.

Investing in managers drives AI adoption

Managers are key to unlocking AI adoption — nearly half of desk workers say they feel uncomfortable disclosing their use of AI to their managers, fearing perceptions of cheating, laziness, or incompetence. And, employees who feel trusted by their managers are 94% more likely to experiment with AI for work-related tasks.

That is why managers play a critical role in leading today’s talent through this transformation — and driving the innovation required to harness agentic AI. While AI literacy is essential, honing human and business skills help create a trusted environment for teams to feel comfortable experimenting with agents. And, every employee will manage agents — or teams of agents — so everyone will need to learn managerial skills. 

At Salesforce, we’ve developed Managing at Salesforce, a new learning course that gives managers the skills and foundational knowledge needed to lead in the digital labor revolution.

The power of internal talent mobility

With data from Career Connect, we have a deep understanding of the skills Salesforce employees have already. This allows us to redeploy top talent into high-growth areas and support employees in their career journey. This also helps promote talent mobility, driving greater efficiencies for the business and helping employees thrive.

The digital labor revolution is here, and it’s reshaping the workplace as we know it.

The digital labor revolution is here, and it’s reshaping the workplace as we know it. The question isn’t whether your job will change, but how. Reskilling is not an option. It’s an imperative, and success in the digital labor revolution belongs to those who are ready to adapt and evolve. 

More information:

• Inside Salesforce’s strategy for agentic AI adoption
• How digital labor will reshape the enterprise
• Become an Agentblazer