On her first morning back from the holidays, Nathalie Scardino did what thousands of Salesforce employees now do reflexively: She opened Slack and typed an AI query to catch up on what she’d missed.
“You go into Slack bar and you can say, ‘Catch me up on approvals. What did I miss from my team?’ And it’s synthesized, it’s there,” says Scardino, Salesforce’s chief people officer.
And according to new internal data Scardino shared during a recent media roundtable, Salesforce employees are also getting up to speed with squeezing the most out of AI. Currently, 85% of the workforce reports feeling confident using AI resources. This is a number that represents not just adoption, but the kind of transformation that HR leaders are racing to replicate in their own organizations. It’s a 16% year-over-year increase that highlights what Scardino calls the company’s “single biggest change.”
That number reflects Salesforce’s positioning of itself as “customer zero” for its own AI strategy, using its 70,000-plus-person workforce as a proving ground for what works in driving AI adoption at scale.
Playing customer zero
“Every CEO, C-suite customer that I interact with is really focused on one question: How do we unlock the full power of agentic AI to deliver results?” Scardino says. “We know that global corporate investment in AI, infrastructure, compute and automation technologies is predicted to be in the trillions by 2030.”
But investment alone won’t drive results, she argues.
“Technology alone is not a strategy,” Scardino says. “The true differentiator and what will distinguish winners in this next era is not the tool itself, but it’s how organizations shape their governance and integrate AI into core workflows.”
This month, Salesforce released its AI Fluency Playbook, a framework the company has been using internally to drive adoption and guide customers through what Scardino calls “the human side of the agentic transformation.”
3 AI fluency metrics that matter
According to Ruth Hickin, Salesforce’s vice president of workforce innovation, the playbook focuses on three specific, measurable dimensions of AI fluency:
- Engagement: “Focused on boosting employee sentiment and confidence around AI,” Hickin says. This measures positive sentiment and willingness to experiment with AI tools.
- Activation: “It’s not just about using AI once a month. It’s about building a habit,” Hickin says. This tracks consistent, ongoing use of AI tools in daily workflows.
- Expertise: “The ability to bring those skill sets around the human, the business, the agentic skills, all together in order to orchestrate that work across the enterprise,” Hickin says.
Scardino emphasizes that learning itself has become the foundational skill. “This is a learning transformation as well, like learning being the meta skill to work well with AI in your everyday,” she says.
Critical thinking before digital delegation
One of the most striking insights from Salesforce’s internal experience centers on the role of judgment and critical thinking.
“I think that human judgment is even more important, even with the guardrails and obviously the trust that’s built into the agent platform,” Scardino says. “I think it’s incredibly important that everybody has that critical-thinking level of skill.”
Greg Shewmaker, CEO of enterprise intelligence consultancy rPotential, who joined the roundtable to discuss his firm’s experience implementing AI fluency programs, reinforced this point.
“One of the biggest challenges in this era of AI is trying to find the constants, because things are evolving so quickly,” he says. “And I think one of those constants that will remain true today and many years into the future are these human skills, like judgment, like agency, like critical thinking.”
Pierre Matchuet, senior vice president of IT and digital transformation at Adecco, who also participated in the roundtable, advised that organizational clarity matters more than technology. “The main topic about AI adoption is not to consider it as a technology,” he says.
“The real obstacle is organizational clarity. What decision can be delegated? Where must humans still be accountable? What does good look like when an agent acts on your behalf?”
This philosophy is reshaping how Salesforce thinks about talent development. The company recently posted a job opening for senior director of agentic talent management and performance systems, a role that didn’t exist six months ago.
What success actually looks like
For all the focus on AI fluency metrics, Shewmaker points out that the ultimate measure remains unchanged.
“Ultimately, it’s better business outcomes,” he says. “There are some interim steps of AI adoption: How many people are using AI? What particular tasks are being assigned to AI? How frequently are people using AI? How comfortable are they delegating more and more work to AI? But ultimately, those are sort of interim steps. The ultimate measurement is going to be: Are business outcomes better than they were previously?”
This perspective echoes throughout Salesforce’s approach. Scardino says employees who use AI daily report not just higher productivity but “better focus and greater job satisfaction.”
The data also reveals the critical role of managers in driving adoption. “Employees with managers who model innovative use of AI are more engaged—in fact, 22 percentage points more engaged than employees whose managers are not necessarily role modeling AI usage from the front,” Scardino says. “So, the role of the manager is more critical than ever.”
An AI fluency framework for HR leaders
The AI Fluency Playbook, which launched Jan. 8, represents Salesforce’s attempt to codify what it’s learned as customer zero.
“We have a lot of questions from employees, from customers, from the ecosystem—like, where do we start?” Scardino says. “And the first thing for us was really redesigning how work gets done. So, we re-imagined how that happens every day. We know that Slack is our front door.”
The playbook is designed to be tool-agnostic, focusing instead on the organizational change management required to make AI adoption stick.
“It’s the difference between deploying tools and actually changing how work gets done,” Scardino says. “And that’s how we describe AI fluency.”
The workforce transformation extends to internal mobility as well. Scardino said 50% of Salesforce’s new hires over the last 12 months have been internal moves, employees taking new jobs and switching roles.
What AI fluency means for HR leaders
Scardino frames the topic for her peers in HR leadership, suggesting that AI fluency should be treated as an organizational capability rather than a tech project.
“It is really about moving into the workforce advantage with people at the center of this massive transformation and change management,” she says. “When AI is used well, it increases employee agency. It gives people more control over how they work, decide and create value.”
The companies that build AI-fluent workforces, Scardino argues, “will respond faster to the changing needs of customers, unlock new sources of growth, attract and retain top talent.”
Hickin emphasizes that the playbook addresses employee fears directly. “It’s what’s worked really well for us internally is acknowledging the fears and responding to them, and not pretending that jobs may not change with AI, but helping support employees to go on that journey,” she said.
Looking ahead, Matchuet from Adecco offers a vision of what success might look like: “If we succeed, work will become less transactional and more intentional. People won’t manage tasks. They will manage outcomes. AI will handle volume, coordination, routine decisions. Humans will focus on judgment, relationship and exception.”
He adds: “The paradox, perhaps, is that the more agentic the workforce will become, the more the human part will matter.”
Scardino seconds that insight: “Today’s business leaders can’t afford to get this wrong.”
