AI Agents Are Poised to Revolutionise Employee Productivity

We're in the middle of a tectonic shift in how people do their jobs. The future of work is one where autonomous AI agents can analyse information, make decisions, and act on behalf of workers — significantly increasing their capability and capacity. This is the vision Slack and Salesforce are delivering.

Our new report, AI Agents Are the Catalyst to a Limitless Workforce, reveals a significant shift in the adoption and impact of AI in the workplace. We surveyed more than 20,000 knowledge workers in 15 countries — from C-suite executives to people managers and individual contributors — to understand if using generative AI tools has resulted in greater productivity and more time for strategic, human work.

To provide actionable insights for business executives who are navigating this shift, we asked more than a dozen leaders in the tech industry to predict where AI-enabled workforces are heading next. Our interviewees include:

• IBM
• Deloitte
• Box
• Writer
• Canva
• Rexera
• MIMIT Health
• Envato
• ManTech
• McLeod Cranes
• ezCater
• Plative
• Straker

One vision was clear in our interviews: The future of work will involve humans collaborating alongside a digital labour force. Although general-purpose AI chatbots and copilots are facing plateaus in their adoption, autonomous agents with clearly defined roles are delivering the productivity promises of the previous wave of AI enthusiasm. To fully capitalise on this revolution, companies must invest in an agentic layer that supports digital labour and reduces the learning curve for employees who have been slow to adopt AI.

Read on to see the top takeaways, and download the report now to get the full picture.

Key insights from our agentic report

Autonomous agents with clearly defined roles are already delivering on AI's productivity promises.

With specific roles and secure guardrails, agents can analyse data, make decisions, and act on behalf of users.People working with agents are 72% more likely to say they feel ‘very productive’ at their job, according to our survey. They spend their time differently than their fellow employees, doing more creative work and skill building. As agents become more ubiquitous and trusted, they'll save time and free up people to focus on high-value strategic tasks.

Greg Vert, Deloitte's AI for Human Capital Leader, sees this transformation as a competitive advantage: ‘Early adopters of autonomous agents will not only benefit from productivity gains but will also have an advantage when it comes to attracting and retaining top talent. High-performing creatives, engineers, and scientists will seek out organisations with agentic AI capabilities to balance their time toward engaging, fulfilling work while improving well-being.'

Agents are emerging at a fortunate time, because general-purpose solutions such as chatbots and copilots have largely underwhelmed in both impact and usage.

After an initial surge in popularity, the use of general-purpose AI tools such as chatbots and copilots is slowing. Our research shows that early AI adopters’ engagement has slowed noticeably, in line with the Gartner Hype Cycle.

Many employees are reverting to manual processes, stymied by a lack of trust, training, and clear use cases. ‘AI may have been overhyped at first, but most people are underestimating its long-term impact,' said Michael Peeler, Head of GTM Analytics and Engineering at IBM. ‘The most important thing to do is to start experimenting with it now.'

Businesses have an opportunity to proactively address these challenges and empower their employees to experiment with specialised, accountable, trustworthy, and collaborative AI agents.

Companies must invest in a digital labour platform that reduces the learning curve for employees who have been slow to adopt AI.

Every team has more work to do than resources available, leading to backlogs, delays, inefficiencies, and poor customer interactions. Many teams have turned to AI to help, but they have no tolerance for inadequate solutions that provide generic responses. Outdated solutions like chatbots and copilots struggle to provide accurate, trusted responses to complex requests — such as personalised guidance on a job application — and can't act on their own.

That's why organisations need a new type of platform designed to supply digital labour in the form of autonomous AI agents that can tap into data, reason, and operate within existing workflows to act on behalf of overwhelmed teams.

People who don't use agents spend nearly 40% more time on admin compared with those who don't. Introducing agents into the workforce frees up employees to learn new skills and transition into more rewarding roles, leading to higher job satisfaction and faster career growth.

Businesses that don't invest in making it easy for their employees to use AI will find it increasingly difficult to keep pace — ultimately jeopardising their market position and growth potential. ‘Organisations that invest early in training and enabling their workforce to use AI in day-to-day work quickly realise both top-line and bottom-line impacts,' said Carissa Kilgour, AI for Workforce Leader at Deloitte.

How leaders can seize the digital labour moment

To capitalise on this new era, businesses must invest in strategies that integrate AI seamlessly into the workplace. This starts with helping employees understand and trust the tools they're using.

‘Asking the right questions and knowing how to manage agents is going to become an essential skill,' said Mark Christianson, Senior Manager of Digital Workspace and AI Strategy at ezCater. ‘AI agents unlock a whole new workforce. Everyone is going to become a manager with a virtual staff of AI agents, and the people who can do prompt engineering well will be most successful. The people who can do this well are the ones who are going to have a significant stake in the future.'

Leaders should encourage their workers to roll up their sleeves and experiment with secure AI agents. ‘We want our employees to recognise there are different tools for different jobs,' said Samantha Garrett, Senior System Engineer at Canva. ‘It's about enabling teams to play and learn in a way that unlocks creativity and innovation.'

An agentic layer simplifies adoption by allowing agents to be intuitive and task-specific, lowering ‌barriers for hesitant users.

Why Agentforce in Slack is the best place to deploy agents

As a conversational platform, Slack's work operating system is the most natural place to deploy these agents to search, act, and collaborate with humans. And the best way to use agents in Slack is Agentforce, Salesforce's agentic layer that lets anyone build and customise trusted, autonomous agents to support their customers and employees around the clock.

Agentforce works because it's deeply integrated with Data Cloud, the Einstein Trust Layer, the Salesforce Platform, our Customer 360 applications, and our ecosystem. It can access all of your enterprise data to reason and take action, no matter where it resides.

Agentforce provides unmatched trust and scalability, continuous innovation, and proactive agent action on a data- and metadata-driven platform. And it sets a new standard for accuracy and relevance by boosting productivity and customer satisfaction to unprecedented levels, seamlessly integrating AI across every workflow, and embedding itself deeply into the heart of the customer journey.

With Agentforce in Slack, businesses can bring people together with all of their data, enterprise apps, workflow automation, and agents in a single command centre. For companies like Box, this integration is already transforming the way employees are working. ‘You go to a single conversational interface in Slack, and you can interact with humans and AI,' said Aaron Levie, Box's CEO. ‘Agents are doing the work, and we've dreamt of that for decades. Now we're finally seeing it.'

To stay competitive, every organisation will need a centralised digital home for their newly augmented workforce. Businesses can't meet their full potential if their people, agents, and data are scattered. On average, workers say they're switching between apps more than 10 times a day and losing 100 minutes to refocusing. Work is more efficient when it's unified and accessible to everyone, which is why it's mission-critical that companies host agents and workers in the same platform. Slack solves this.

Most importantly, Slack is the safest and most effective work OS for companies planning to deploy agents, because Agentforce is built on strict trust and security standards. For every Agentforce interaction, the Einstein Trust Layer works behind the scenes to protect the privacy and security of your data and to promote the safety and accuracy of every response.

Download the full report to learn more about the challenges facing workers around the world and how we can solve them together. Welcome to the agentic era!