At this year’s TrailblazerDX, Salesforce announced that we are in what is being coined as a “global labor shortage”. But before anyone in the crowd of Trailblazers could really consider what this meant, Salesforce had presented their solution – using agentic AI to create a “digital labor revolution”.
Will Agentforce spearhead this movement as Salesforce intends, or will larger technological trends pose more challenges to consider?
The Problem: A Global Labor Shortage?
According to the United Nations, annual global population growth has slowed to <1% as of 2025, taking births, deaths, and migration into account. This has led to what publications such as The New York Times and Axios are branding as a hiring crisis, where organizations can’t obtain the workforces they need. In fact, as shown in Salesforce’s TDX keynote, 85 million jobs could go unfilled by 2030, which is heavily influenced by this apparent global labor shortage.
However, the difficult part about analyzing employment trends is that these said trends vary eminently depending on demographics. When Salesforce talks about a global labor shortage, we need to consider who this actually affects, as this will vary from country to country and region to region, as well as role to role. We’ll get back to this later.
Agentforce: The Digital Labor Platform
When Salesforce announced Agentforce 2.0 at the end of last year, it was pitched as a “digital labor platform” that would “revolutionize enterprise productivity by addressing labor shortages while enhancing personalized insights and analytics.”
This was perhaps the first time Salesforce had spoken about addressing this apparent labor shortage, and it was becoming more evident that Agentforce and its technology would play a notable role in Salesforce’s efforts to counter that.
Salesforce went on to claim that Agentforce 2.0 would help address common employee issues such as poor productivity, staff burnout, and general labor shortages, saving organizations from an overwhelming collision of these issues. Essentially, it provides a way for organizations to stay afloat when their employees are being… well, human.
Although Agentforce’s agents still require human supervision, the thinking behind this is fairly clear – what better way to tackle the signature negatives of employee behavior than with a technology that isn’t able to fall into these behaviors?
Salesforce’s Solution: Agentic AI
Patrick Stokes, the EVP of Production and Industries Marketing at Salesforce, led the announcement at TDX of Salesforce’s approach to managing this supposed labor shortage with agentic AI. “What if we could use software – what if we could use technology to scale human capabilities and agentic AI to create a digital labor revolution?” he asked.
To Salesforce, the “human-only” workforce faces drawbacks like fixed capacity, burnout, and slow growth. The next installment of employment, “humans with agents”’, will result in benefits such as unlimited experts, zero hold time, and unlimited growth.
It is not difficult to see the perks of a human/agent relationship in the workplace, especially in a variation of the manager/secretary arrangement, and this is something that has rarely been challenged.
However, as a solution to a digital labor shortage, the connection isn’t so straightforward, especially if you consider what it means for junior professionals eager to enter the ecosystem and the fact that there may not even be a digital labor shortage at all.
Is There Really a Global Labor Shortage?
If we look at it matter-of-factly, a declining population could mean that there are fewer people to fill roles. However, combine the fact that there are often fewer jobs than the people to fill them with the fact that people are now forced to make smarter job decisions to keep them afloat with the current cost of living crisis, and things get pretty blurry, pretty fast.
Of course, it also depends on the region, as mentioned earlier. A breakdown of this issue by The Economist, titled ‘Why “labor shortages” don’t really exist’, explains that the differences between the economic environments in regions play a big part in the overall view of this shortage.
“In low-unemployment America, a third of firms say they experience recruitment challenges as candidates lack the right skills. In high-unemployment Italy, a quarter have the same complaint.”
The story of a global labor shortage, anytime it’s brought up, is consistent. “When jobs are plentiful, people say there is a labor shortage. It is hard for bosses to find staff. But when unemployment is high, people still say there is a shortage,” the author said.
A big reason as to why there might not actually be a shortage is due to a question of price and distribution rather than scarcity. This means that organizations are not actually up against a lack of potential employees – they’re up against a lack of employees willing to work for what they’re offering.
“There is always scarcity of very high-performing individuals – that’s why they are valuable. Calling that a “shortage” is just relabelling market-clearing price differences.”
When you’re up against something like a cost of living crisis, then this really makes sense. But even if we weren’t, even entry-level workers in the Salesforce ecosystem are expected to specialize and stand out because they’re up against so many other people for a number of jobs that just aren’t there.
This goes alongside the years of talk that said you could earn your Salesforce Administrator certification and then receive a six-figure salary; circumstances and expectations are so different now that professionals are left unsure of what to think.
Over on Reddit, the sentiment is very much the same.
“There is an excess of tech workers,” one person wrote. “Too many people in America have skills and experience, but there aren’t enough jobs to go around.”
“Now the job market is flooded with experienced tech individuals causing newbies to have a tougher time obtaining a job,” another person wrote.
It must be noted that these opinions, albeit relevant, are in connection to the wider tech industry. With that in mind, how has the Salesforce ecosystem specifically responded to this?
What Does the Salesforce Community Think?
One of the most compelling reactions to this discussion has actually come from the Salesforce community itself. Melinda Smith, a Salesforce Solution Architect and the Founder of Consultants on Demand, posted a LinkedIn status shortly after TrailblazerDX that spoke about the impact of this discussion on her and her wider thoughts on the dangers of this kind of narrative.
“At TDX this past week, a keynote speaker from Salesforce stated that developers are most concerned with the declining global birth rate and how that will affect business,” she wrote.
“I was stunned. In a world where women already carry so much of the burden, how did this become a topic of concern in a developer keynote? Not only does this rhetoric align uncomfortably with some of the more extreme, regressive political narratives, but it also ignores the real reasons birth rates are declining – economic hardship, lack of support for working parents, and healthcare challenges.”
“It felt out of touch. And honestly? It felt unsettling.”
Members of the community responded in an outpouring of support, with many stating that they, too, felt the same.
Ben LaMothe, a Salesforce MVP, said that the subtle inclusion of comments like that into professional presentations about completely unrelated topics is “how that narrative goes from regressive to accepted fact.”
Lesley Higgins, a Salesforce Marketing Cloud Technical Architect, said that she was grateful to not be the only one with these feelings.
“This is actually the second time I have heard that narrative from Salesforce in the last couple of months, meaning that they have chosen to make this their narrative,” she said.
The Now, Not Then
Another big part of this is that the community has felt as if nobody has been hiring for quite some time. Stephanie Herrera, the founder of Salesforce Saturdays and the co-founder of PepUp Tech, said that she feels as if the US Salesforce ecosystem has been experiencing a bit of a hiring freeze.
“With our work at PepUpTech, we put a lot of that on pause just because people just aren’t hiring entry-level,” she told Salesforce Ben.
This is also reflected in a couple of key statistics from our latest salary survey, as 87% of respondents said that the market has been more challenging than in previous years, and almost 40% of the respondents who have looked for a job in the past 18 months said that it took them between three months to over one year to find their current role.
Whether there is legitimately a global tech labor shortage or not, it is evident that many professionals are still struggling to find jobs in this ecosystem. The bad news is that, unfortunately, it’s also likely to get much harder.
The Rise of Virtual Employees
As Agentforce is still relatively new, it might be hard to look past an agentic future. However, according to industry analyst Vernon Keenan, it is pertinent that we do – especially as a future of virtual employees will create shockwaves in the industry that organizations will need to prepare for.
A virtual employee (VE) is what Vernon refers to as an “AI agent designed to fulfill a human job role, with cognitive skills and communication abilities similar to a regular human employee”. He distinguishes VEs from regular agents, emphasizing their ability to handle roles rather than just tasks.
Essentially, VEs are the next step in the advancement of employment as we know it and will likely follow after we’ve reached the boundaries of human + agent working. In fact, we’ve already seen the start of this with Google’s AI co-scientist, which already has an impressive network capacity and potential for future development.
Vernon says his VE vision aligns with Salesforce’s digital labor platform efforts, noting that VEs can provide cheaper labor and align with the Law of Infinite Scale, one of three key laws he has positioned at the heart of all VE ideas and framework.
“Companies now view human labor as a constraint rather than a requirement for growth,” he said. “We are witnessing what we have begun to call the White-Collar Recession of 2025. Unlike recessions of the past, this phenomenon isn’t driven by economic contraction.”
“We have moved beyond what we have labeled the Quiet Erosion, a period when AI incrementally absorbed routine tasks without dramatic layoffs. We’re in a new phase – one characterized by what we’ve referred to as the Super-Exponential Effect, where AI-driven efficiency improvements compound rapidly, accelerating job displacement at unprecedented speed.”
Virtual employees will be a great solution for businesses looking to chase growth at lower costs, but for human employees, it could spell disaster.
“The Trailblazer community is concerned about AI job displacement, and I agree that they should be,” Vernon said. “I think that the entry-level jobs are probably quietly disappearing. I don’t think that it would be helpful to hope that market resurgence would come back and help people with that.”
So, with virtual employees likely to appear in the near future, what can we expect, and how do both current and future professionals protect themselves in this new era?
What Can We Expect and When?
When asked about just when we could expect a real boom of virtual employees (VEs), Vernon said that they’re not really here yet but that he expected they would be by the end of 2026. Whether that looks like a mixture between autonomous VEs and collaborative human-AI interactions or not is less clear.
The World Economic Forum predicts that the human share of work with the help of automation is likely to decrease from 47% to 33% by 2030, and that’s only a five-year estimate. The possibilities beyond that point are seemingly limitless, putting pressure on the fact that change and adaptations need to happen now.
Vernon predicts that VEs are likely to impact consultants the most, suggesting that agile consultants who adopt AI tools will benefit while traditional consultants may face challenges.
“I think what’s going to happen is a mixture between buying AI services from companies like Salesforce and paying them, and then that enables you, though, to internalize functions more because you’ve got cognitive things at your command, like a process mapping tool, for example.”
Vernon made it clear that businesses, educational institutions, and governments must all come together to urgently develop strategies to address this unprecedented economic shift, but where businesses are driven to keep growth high and costs low, the employee will almost always be the one forced to undertake the most effort.
How Can We Get Ahead in a VE Future?
It is likely that VEs fit into the employee development structure as a natural successor to offshore employees. When costs got too high, organizations began relying more and more on offshore employees for cheaper labor costs. What happens when they get too expensive? A shift to virtual employees.
In turn, this will further impact the so-called “white-collar recession” we’re in, as well as the quiet erosion of entry-level jobs, negatively contributing to an unfortunate pattern of incremental progress by leaving companies stuck when their senior staff retire or move on.
Virtual employees and agents might fill the junior market well, but much more development will be needed to get them to the level of senior human resources.
In this scenario, it wouldn’t be too far-fetched to assume that a majority of organizations would want the employee to upskill themselves in order to keep costs low, which ultimately puts the professional at the heart of their own success.
An AI with experienced supervision checking its work will always outcompete junior developers, and there is no point in trying to fight that. Where humans can outperform is with human skills that make roles such as the business analyst and the consultant so important to customers.
Holding onto the very human skills of communication, empathy, investigation, and active listening whilst also making sure that you are as up-to-date as possible with any AI training will be key in remaining important in any AI future, whether that’s with VEs or agents.
It is unlikely that AI in this sector will be fully autonomous anytime soon. That is why making sure that professionals have the skills to work harmoniously with AI will be the key to coming out on top, especially when VEs could very well become a consideration for businesses looking to cut costs, whether there is a shortage or not.
Final Thoughts
So, are we in a global labor shortage? Opinions are definitely mixed, but one thing is for sure: when you’re dealing with a topic that impacts humans at the core rather than just professionals, a lot of empathy and consideration is needed to prevent any accusations of pinning the blame or solving one issue before fixing the root cause.
Salesforce’s plans to use Agentforce to tackle any current or future industry employment gaps seem understandable enough on paper, but when they begin sermonizing this to the ecosystem that is already worried about being replaced by the very technology they’re supposed to be excited about, a disconnect is unavoidable.
The future of AI in the tech space and the possibilities of harmonious collaboration between humans and AI are immensely exciting, but organizations need to remember that people are and always will be at the forefront of these advancements – not AI.
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