Scott Stafford and I had Vala Afshar on the show. Vala is the Chief Digital Evangelist at Salesforce, a title he’s held for almost eleven years. He’s an electrical engineer, holds a US patent, and has written three books. I’ve been recruiting for 26 years, the last eight running Salesforce Staffing, a Salesforce recruiting firm. I place Salesforce admins, developers, architects and consultants, and the question I hear most right now is some version of “Will I still have a job?” Vala has a front-row seat to how a big company is answering that.

Two years ago, zero agents. Now 300.

Vala walked us through three waves of AI. The first was predictive: using data to describe the past, diagnose it, predict what happens next, and prescribe what to do. The second was generative, which most people met in November 2022. The third is agentic. For 24 years Salesforce built software that people used as a tool. Now, he says, it builds digital labor.

Two years ago Salesforce had zero AI agents. Vala says it now runs about 300, and the average company he works with has around twenty. He doesn’t think this is only a big-company play. A 30-person firm and a 30,000-person firm face the same choice.

His view on why it matters: silos kill businesses, and AI will kill siloed businesses faster. He points out that 65% of the Fortune 500 has disappeared since 2000.

It took six months before they took their hands off the wheel

Vala uses driving to explain how work moves to agents. We all learned with hands on the wheel. Then cruise control showed up and our hands were ready but not driving. Full autonomy means hands off.

Salesforce’s help site got there, but it took about six months of grounding the data before its agents hit a 71% resolution rate. Only then could the company move people. When it did, it had a choice: cut those roles or keep the people. It kept them. Vala says about 3,000 people moved into sales without adding to headcount, and Trailhead did the reskilling.

If you’re a hiring manager, that’s the order of operations. The agent has to work before the people move, and the people need a path when they do.

Take inventory of your own work

Vala’s advice to anyone worried about their job is to be honest about it. List what you do. Routine, well-specified, repetitive work is moving to software. Judgment, governance, checking the work and relationships are becoming the core job.

So ask how much of your week is transactional and how much is building relationships, and put more into the relationships. He cited Harvard’s long-running study of adult development, which followed people for more than 80 years and found that the quality of their relationships predicted health and happiness better than money or fame. His line: technology transformation is the lowercase t. Relationship transformation is the capital T.

What he hires for

I asked Vala what he looks for beyond IQ when he’s deciding whether someone will still fit in three years.

He hires for attitude and trains for aptitude. Attitude, to him, means a high rate of learning, agency and self-awareness. He called self-awareness a superpower because most people don’t have it.

Then trust. He uses Rachel Botsman’s definition: trust is competence plus character. Competence is being capable and reliable, and you need both. Character is integrity and benevolence, meaning why you do what you do. Vala used Scott as the example. Scott promotes other people’s work almost every day, and most of them can’t do anything for him in return. That’s what makes people trust him.

He also had no patience for “my company can’t afford to train me.” His answer was to invest in yourself first. He came to the US as a ten-year-old refugee and learned early that nobody owes you anything.

He got hired at Salesforce without a resume

Vala told a story I’ll be repeating. When Salesforce recruited him, he didn’t have a CV. He’d been hired out of grad school after winning a research competition and never needed one. When the executive recruiter asked for it, he had a pit in his stomach. He told her he didn’t have one. Within about ten seconds she said that was fine, they’d learn about his work another way.

To Vala, that told him something good about the company. Vala says Salesforce gets about one and a half million applicants a year. A recruiter who can look past a missing document at that volume is looking at the person.

Be a chef, not a cook

Vala closed with this. For most of his career he worked like a cook. Give him a spec and he’d build a good product, the same way a cook follows a recipe. A chef tastes ingredients, experiments and is willing to make something awful while learning. In the last 20 years we’ve gotten a lot of new ingredients: cloud, mobile, social, natural language processing, agentic AI, autonomous vehicles. If you only follow old recipes, you’ll fall behind.

He also said to write more. He reads to improve his writing and writes to improve his thinking. Sitting down to write shows you fast how much you don’t know yet.

I wrote more about staying valuable as AI changes the work here.

If you want to stay hireable

• List your work. Move time from transactional tasks to relationships, judgment and checking the work.
• Use AI tools every day. Don’t wait for your company to pay for training.
• Show a high rate of learning and self-awareness. That’s what Vala hires for.
• Build trust: be capable, be reliable, and help people who can’t help you back.
• Find a sponsor, not just a mentor. A sponsor puts their own standing on the line for you.

About the guest

Vala Afshar is the Chief Digital Evangelist at Salesforce. He’s an engineer and a US patent holder, has written three books, and has worked with Salesforce technology since 2003.

About The Hiring Edge

I host The Hiring Edge with my co-host, Scott Stafford. I own Salesforce Staffing, a Salesforce recruiting firm. On the show we talk about hiring, interviewing and the Salesforce job market, for hiring managers and Salesforce professionals.

• Salesforce Staffing: https://thesalesforcerecruiter.com
• Salesforce: https://www.salesforce.com
• Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/l6DPp2nFBu4
• Listen: https://thehiringedge.buzzsprout.com/2134593/episodes/19533035-silos-kill-businesses-salesforce-s-vala-afshar-on-surviving-the-agentic-ai-wave