“The people who will thrive will be the ones who work with AI responsibly” - Salesforce UKI CEO on how to really use AI to get the most out of your workforce

With AI now playing a central role in most businesses, the question of where we go next with adoption and evolution is becoming increasingly pertinent for many firms.

Salesforce has been bolder than most in pushing forward the AI revolution, and at its recent Dreamforce 2025 event in San Francisco, agents and the possibilities they offer were top of the agenda.

To find out more about the effects businesses can really expect, we spoke to Salesforce UK&I CEO Zahra Bahrololoumi.

"A profound next chapter"

“The combination of AI with robotics and operational technology in our physical environment will be a profound next chapter,” Bahrololoumi told TechRadar Pro at a media Q&A roundtable at Dreamforce 2025.

Asked by TechRadar Pro if she still backed her claim made earlier in 2025 at the company’s London Agentforce World Tour event that the potential of AI is bigger than that of the Internet, Bahrololoumi agreed wholeheartedly.

“We have to go through that in every innovation cycle,” she said. “We adapt and adjust, and AI is embedded now. I don’t think we will go back, the people who will thrive will be the ones who work with AI responsibly.”

Bahrololoumi has always been a big supporter of skills training and development, and was keen to emphasise the importance of encouraging and building up newcomers to the workforce - even with the risk of AI taking over many of the roles in so-called lower skilled jobs.

This is despite Salesforce as a whole apparently looking to cut human workers in favor of AI tools - with CEO Marc Benioff recently revealing the company has already reduced customer support roles by around 50% as a result of its own internal success with agentic AI tools.

“I think it's interesting why we've seen this surge, because a commercial business or a mid-market business will not have the resources readily available to scale humans,” Bahrololoumi said.

“And yet they are growing because they're taking advantage of the technology that can enable them to grow and decouple that growth from headcount.”

“Our message here is: do not sacrifice your entry-level jobs because you do need people that can work through that function, that process that can work alongside the AI to be able to manage and lead that composition of digital and human capital,” Bahrololoumi added.

“If companies eliminate entry-level hiring, they will not have the right skill profile to be able to orchestrate and manage the duality, or maybe the multimodality, that will be our future.”

Overall, Bahrololoumi had a positive view of Salesforce’s potential in the UK, which she noted is the third biggest AI market, after the US and China - potential boosted by the recent acquisition of Convergence.ai, giving the UK arm an engineering and R&D capability outside of North America locally within the region.