Imagine every meeting feeling like a taxing, high-stakes juggling act. For Amy Wood, manager of accessible events and real estate/travel at Salesforce, this was her reality. As a deaf individual who relies on captions, Wood struggled to keep up with the fast-paced conversations in meetings. She divided her attention between reading captions, jotting down notes, and trying to stay present, an exhausting and often ineffective process. Now, Wood is taking back control.
Wood uses Agentforce, Salesforce’s agentic AI platform for employees and customers, to help manage her day-to-day work. With Agentforce’s meeting summary feature, Wood no longer has to choose between taking notes and being an active participant.
The AI captures all the meeting details and even allows her to ask clarifying questions to a summary document later, freeing her to be fully present and collaborate with colleagues in real time.
No longer tied to transcribing, Wood is able to engage more proactively, knowing that Agentforce will be there to support and help her unlock her full potential.
How you can do it: Look for an AI platform that can transcribe, summarize, and analyze voice and video calls. The tool should provide a digestible summary of the event and be able to answer questions about what was discussed.
The bigger picture: The reality of integrating AI
Wood’s story is a powerful example of a much larger trend. While everyone is focused on the headline-grabbing potential of what AI could do, a quiet AI adoption is already transforming how employees work.
The numbers prove it: With daily AI usage up 233% in the past six months, AI is no longer just a tool — it’s a new competitive advantage. The average AI user is 64% more productive and 81% more satisfied with their job.
But what does this shift look like in practice, beyond the big stats and headlines? The answer is simple: It looks a lot like Wood’s story. It isn’t about dramatic, ground-breaking changes, but about people on the front lines taking AI and tailoring it to solve personal and professional challenges in innovative ways.
At Salesforce, employees are using AI tools daily to empower their careers, enhance productivity, and redefine their daily scope of work.
Powering a career change with AI
More than half of U.S. workers are either seeking new jobs or watching for opportunities, according to The Wall Street Journal. Brooke Grant, an enablement business partner at Salesforce, was one of them.
Feeling a need to pivot from her role as a change manager, Grant turned to Salesforce’s AI-powered career marketplace to help her navigate a professional transition within the company.
Grant’s career change wasn’t left to chance. She used Career Connect, an internal AI tool that analyzes a user’s resume and profile to identify key strengths, weaknesses, trainings and potential career opportunities. But Grant didn’t just use the tool for insight; she leveraged it as a strategic guide.
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“Career Connect informed how I positioned myself,” she said. She used the AI’s findings to frame her strengths during interviews, highlighting the skills that the AI found to overlap with her desired role. For any skill gaps identified, she proactively worked to improve them. This innovative approach transformed her job search from a shot in the dark into a confident, informed process.
With the help of Career Connect, Grant was able to successfully move within the company to a role in sales, a path she would have never considered on her own. In her new role, Grant said she feels more integrated in the business, included in decision-making, and empowered to “flex muscles I haven’t used much before.” Her story is a powerful example of how AI can move a career forward, identifying not just the next logical step, but new, broader opportunities to grow.
How you can do it: Consider a more strategic approach to your professional journey. Instead of simply applying for roles that seem like the next logical step, use an AI tool to analyze your resume and profile. This allows you to identify your key strengths for interviews, pinpoint specific areas for growth and possibly uncover unexpected career opportunities that align with your skills.
Using AI as an always-on sounding board
For Piyali Mandal, director of IT enablement, Agentforce isn’t just another tool — it’s a 24/7 personal sounding board that provides instant feedback and insight. It helps her proactively identify potential pain points and unseen opportunities in her work.
Features such as Agentforce’s meeting summary have changed Mandal’s scope of work.
When she misses a meeting, instead of tediously watching the recordings, she uses Agentforce’s meeting summary and Q&A features to get straight to the core details and action items. This not only frees up her calendar but allows her to stay fully informed, quickly and efficiently.
Agentforce has also completely transformed how Mandal approaches and prepares for meetings. She no longer enters a meeting just to gather initial ideas. Instead, she prompts Agentforce to consider multiple team perspectives, from sales to marketing to PR, and generate a working foundation of ideas before the meeting. This isn’t about skipping collaboration; it’s about elevating it. By walking into a meeting with a ready-made understanding of different viewpoints, she enables the team to move the conversation from basic information-sharing to high-level strategic collaboration.
How you can do it: Start by using an AI tool to do the initial groundwork for you before a meeting begins. Instead of entering a meeting to brainstorm from scratch, pre-populate your agenda with a foundation of ideas, synthesized from multiple team perspectives. This frees you from the tedious first steps and allows you to use your meeting time for what it was meant for: making decisions and collaborating on a high level.
Cutting meetings and gaining hours with a Slack workflow
How many times have you sat in a meeting and thought, “This could have been an email”? Kim Root, director of solution engineering, knows that feeling well. That’s why she embraced AI to remove some of her team’s meetings altogether.
Prior to implementing a new process, the team’s solution engineers were aligned to specific accounts.
However, with the growing number of accounts and account executives requiring support, this model quickly became a bottleneck. To effectively scale the business, Kim’s manager implemented an innovative new solution.
Root’s team previously spent meetings reviewing numerous support requests one by one — a tedious exercise and an inefficient use of everyone’s time. Instead, they created an automated Slack workflow called “Scale and Precision.” The workflow enables account executives to quickly provide crucial account information — such as the size of a deal and the specific task — in order to request a solution engineer’s support.
This innovative process allowed Root to get all the information she needed to quickly assess and assign the right solution engineer to the task, all without scheduling a single meeting. The workflow acts as a powerful information hub, helping her make faster, more informed decisions while preserving her valuable time.
How you can do it: Analyze the bottlenecks and pain points on your team. Look for repetitive processes that could be turned into an automated workflow that’s easily accessible. Slack offers tools for users to create personal and team workflows, taking care of the busywork and freeing up more time for high-impact work.
Leveling the onboarding curve with AI
It can take an average of eight months for a new employee to reach full productivity, a period often filled with confusion and questions as they try to navigate a company’s unique internal processes.
Brian Kim, a six-year Salesforce veteran, has seen this challenge firsthand and offers a strategic solution to it.
According to Kim, an account executive, a steep learning curve of hidden, unwritten company knowledge prevents new employees — whether they’re entry-level or seasoned professionals — from becoming fully productive. These employees often need quick and accurate answers to company-specific questions that aren’t easily found in a ready-made handbook, limiting their ability to contribute effectively.
Kim has found a powerful solution in AI resources like Slack AI, a built-in AI tool that meets employees right where they work. By using features such as answer searches, channel recaps, and thread summaries, new employees can find the information they need themselves, allowing them to sidestep the typical time-consuming process of asking numerous questions and waiting for answers. For example, a new hire can use Slack AI to quickly pull past project templates and recap formatting and structure, getting a head start on an assignment without relying on colleagues to answer routine workplace questions.
This innovative use of AI not only improves a company’s efficiency but also empowers the incoming workforce. It allows new hires to adapt, understand, and integrate into their teams more quickly, bypassing the traditional learning curve and getting them to full productivity faster.
How you can do it: Think about how you can streamline the onboarding process. Build employee training models that are crawlable and searchable with AI, and design learning paths for new hires that can both easily respond to questions and document those questions for continuous improvement.
The impact of innovating AI
The true potential of AI isn’t in what it can do on its own, but in how workers can strategically leverage it. As Mandal puts it, “It’s not about AI taking my job, it’s about those who are using AI more effectively.”
The future of work isn’t about AI replacing people; it’s about AI freeing them to do more. As these stories show, AI is a tool that allows employees to move from tedious, time-consuming tasks to more valuable work. It provides an agentic advantage, freeing up time, breaking down barriers, and enabling professionals to be more present, prepared, and productive.
The lesson is clear: For an evolving workforce to thrive, we must develop a deeper understanding of AI not as a threat, but as a strategic partner to power our work and unlock our full potential.
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