How Salesforce is using AI career coaches to hire employees internally

• Salesforce is launching AI tools to up-skill employees and help them transition internally.
• Salesforce piloted its Career Connect service last year and 28% of users applied for jobs on the platform.
• The company is investing in AI career coaches in preparation of major workforce changes due to AI.

Brooke Grant was working as a change manager at Salesforce when the company's internal AI Career Agent pinged her on Slack to suggest an open role in sales enablement.

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

While Grant didn't have any sales experience, she had been skilling up in sales, AI, and customer success for a few months leading up to the opportunity. She said the platform, which highlighted her transferable skills, gave her the confidence to go for it.

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

While many companies are chasing productivity gains, Salesforce is taking a broader approach to AI adoption by investing in internal AI career tools to help employees pivot to new roles and skill up.

Last year, Salesforce launched Career Connect, an AI-powered internal talent marketplace. Once users create a profile, the platform infers skills based on their job history and helps employees create personalized career paths based on their skills and goals, Salesforce told BI. The tool also helps Salesforce track trending skills so it can invest in targeted training, the company told BI.

The platform is also available in Slack through a version called Career Agent. Employees can go back and forth with the tool to get actionable insight on reaching their career goals. Salesforce told BI that employees can ask the agent about open career opportunities or how to develop a skill. The AI-powered tool recommends courses, relevant contacts, and job opportunities based on the user's interests.

Salesforce filled half its roles internally in Q1

Salesforce piloted Career Connect last year with 1,200 employees across its customer success, employee success, and business technology teams. The company said 74% of employees were active on the platform, logging in multiple times throughout the three-month pilot. Just under 40% of participants enrolled in courses and training that were suggested to them, the company said.

Grant isn't the only employee who found success with Salesforce's AI career coaches. In the first three months of the pilot, 28% of participants applied for jobs through Career Connect, and over 90% of the roles filled by participants were discovered using the platform, the company said.

Salesforce president and chief people officer Nathalie Scardino also said in a press briefing that with Career Agent, the company was able to fill half of its roles with internal applications in the first quarter of 2025.

Some of the career transitions employees made were more unconventional. Salesforce executive Lori Castillo Martinez told Business Insider in an interview that one employee recently used Career Connect to transition to a cybersecurity role after spending 19 years as a program manager in human resources. Martinez said the platform connected the employee to a mentoring program with someone from the cybersecurity team, which encouraged him to pursue the role.

"I hadn't even thought about cybersecurity as a pathway for some of our HR program managers," Martinez said.

Preparing for transformation

Salesforce is pushing these efforts as the company has already seen changes to its workforce as a result of AI. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff previously announced a 2025 hiring freeze on engineers following a 30% productivity increase from new tools.

Recent data also indicates that workforce transformation will evolve further in the coming years. Salesforce released the findings of a research study on Monday that surveyed 200 chief people officers, chief human resources officers, and other global HR leaders.

The study revealed that CHROs expect to redeploy 23% of the workforce into new teams or roles in the next two years. While 61% of the workforce is expected to stay in their positions, the roles are expected to change. About 80% of CHROs surveyed are either planning to reskill employees for roles with better future opportunities.

"Every industry must redesign jobs, reskill and redeploy talent — and every employee will need to learn new human, agent and business skills to thrive in the digital labor revolution," Scardino said in a statement.