Salesforce is to make a major investment in AI training. Following the success of its London AI centre earlier this year, Salesforce has announced the creation of a pop-up AI centre at its headquarters in San Francisco. It also plans to offer even more AI training worldwide in different offices. It has named Chicago, Tokyo, and Sydney as locations where it will hold physical versions of Trailhead courses.
These venues will bring together industry experts, partners, and customers to advance AI innovation and offer urgent upskilling opportunities. This is in addition to its commitment to Trailhead, where it already offers free hands-on AI courses and certifications.
The training available on Trailhead is end-to-end, from data management to data science. It also includes training on machine learning, artificial intelligence, Generative AI and Agentic AI.
A significant investment to address the global AI skills
Salesforce has announced that these initiatives represent a $50 million investment in addressing the global AI skills gap. Premium courses and certifications, which Salesforce is making available free of charge until the end of 2025, are also available on Trailhead.
This Salesforce force initiative differs from others, such as that announced by Accenture. It is more than just minimal training to make people aware of AI and how to develop prompt engineering skills.
Through Trailhead, people can go to a much deeper level and prepare for the future. If given the time, organisations can enable their employees to be skilled enough to take advantage of the Salesforce AI solutions within their organisation.
Brian Millham, President and Chief Operating Officer at Salesforce, commented, “The advent of AI and agents represents the biggest technological shift of our generation, and will radically change how people work. We need to ensure everyone is equipped with the skills they need to succeed in this new AI world.”
A growing urgency for skills training
Earlier this year, Pluralsight Research indicated that 81% of IT professionals think that they can use AI. However, only 12% have the skills to do so. Furthermore, 70% of workers likely need to upgrade their AI skills.
Slack research indicated that the executive urgency to deploy AI tools has increased seven fold over the last six months. The lack of deployment is a growing concern. In addition, similar to Pluralsight, only 15% of workers strongly agree that they have the education and training necessary to use AI effectively.
AI is being adopted, and various studies have shown an increase in AI adoption at home and work. The Slack research revealed that two-thirds of people still do not use AI at work, which seems low compared to other studies. Research by LinkedIn and Microsoft found that 75% of all employees use AI at work in some capacity.
Trailhead is leading the way.
Trailhead has helped hundreds of thousands of people develop technical and non-technical skills related to the Salesforce platform and business knowledge. As it extends the AI training offering, it now aims to train an additional 100,000 learners. The intent is to develop every Trailblazer into an Agentblazer and prepare them for the age of Agentic AI.
There is a huge demand for AI skills within the Salesforce ecosystem. Already, Trailhead users have earned more than 2.6 million AI and data badges. They are unlocking the key skills they need as Agentforce rolls out across organisations. 40% of these have been earned by Salesforce employees.
It all starts with internal training
Salesforce is also training its 72,000-employee workforce as it transitions to what it feels is a new age for technology solutions. It has set aside quarterly AI learning days, preparing them to use the Salesforce Agentforce platform internally and explain it externally.
As part of the initiative Salesforce has dedicated a floor of its headquarters to create immersive learning experiences for employees worldwide. This location has been dubbed the AI Knowledge Centre.
Salesforce is already seeing the benefit of this training on AI. With the entire organisation using Slack AI, staff have saved nearly 3 million work hours over the last six months. They use its ability to automate repetitive tasks using a conversational interface to find answers, summarize information, and spark ideas.
Nathalie Scardino, President and Chief People Officer at Salesforce, commented, “As with other technological revolutions, AI will transform the way we work, creating new jobs and opportunities – it already has. It’s our responsibility as employers to provide training opportunities to ensure the workforce has the skills needed to succeed in those roles.
“Salesforce has always been a platform for change, and grounded in our values. We’re bringing the full power of Salesforce – from our technology to our spaces to our people – to bring everyone along.”
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
Salesforce continues to impress with Trailhead. This latest investment and initiative will enable customers to train employees at a time when training budgets are stretched, often in preference for investment in technology.
With the advent of Agentforce and Salesforce’s intention to get over 1,000 customers live on the new agents before the end of Dreamforce, this announcement is welcome. It goes further than many others.
With free access to certifications and advanced training, organisations and individuals will be able to reskill workforces and prepare for their people-centric digital transformation initiatives to adopt AI throughout their businesses.
