Salesforce exec says rise of AI agents means ‘every job should be rethought’

AI agents are coming to a workplace near you. In an Ernst & Young poll of tech executives last month, 48% said they are already adopting or fully deploying agentic AI.

Autonomous AI agents can complete tasks, pursue goals, and make decisions on behalf of users. The technology means company leaders should be questioning the way roles are currently set up in their organization, according to Andy Valenzuela, an executive vice president at Salesforce.

“Every job should be rethought,” he said during Fortune’s Workplace Innovation Summit on Tuesday.

He described the experience of a Salesforce customer that deployed agents to speed up the loan process, which can take “a tremendous amount of human time” but that an AI agent “can do in a matter of seconds.”

“An agent can look and evaluate and make a recommendation on whether somebody is viable for a loan or not, but it’s still completed with a human,” he added.

The role of people in that process has changed, however—now, most of the tedious work is done by agents, and a person checks the results and makes the final decision.

“Agents are like ants,” said Phenom CEO Mahe Bayireddi, who joined Valenzuela onstage. They can handle the repetitive, irritating tasks, and that’s what we’ll delegate to them, he added.

But “the idea here isn’t that they’re going to completely go off and do everything on their own,” Valenzuela added.

He described how Salesforce recently used an AI agent to help launch a new pay planning system within the company. Rather than “days of meetings and training sessions” to teach employees how to use the system, the company built and used an AI agent for the task.

“In literally real time, every manager could go engage with this agent, and it enabled them on an entirely new system,” he said.

With the agent handling that, employees could refocus on a different part of the work, he noted. “It was one of those rethinks of, where’s my team’s broader focus?” The experience showed him that with AI agents, it’s about “constantly evaluating, where can I get wins and refocus my talent on more critical opportunities?”

So how should companies adapt to the reality of AI agents?

“From an organizational standpoint,” he said, “I think it is really about creating orgs that are flexible, creating orgs that are going to allow for these agentic capabilities—and leaning in.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com