Nathalie Scardino

Leading Employee Success at Salesforce

Nathalie Scardino is President and Chief People Officer at Salesforce, where she leads the Global Employee Success organization. Salesforce's biography says her remit covers AI-driven employee engagement, hiring and workforce planning, equality initiatives and the company's values-led culture, and that her current focus is guiding employees through the shift to AI agents, including reskilling programs such as Career Connect.^[1]

In her own writing for Salesforce she presents the job as a people challenge as much as a technology one: AI agents, she argues, are meant to free people from routine work and support their productivity, creativity and sense of purpose.^[2][4]

From executive search to the people organization

Scardino began her career at Reed Elsevier, now RELX Group, in sales and then moved into executive search in its technology and digital transformation practice. There, according to Salesforce, she identified senior leaders and led succession planning for public and early-stage companies. She holds a bachelor's degree from Goldsmiths, University of London.^[1]

She has spent more than a decade at Salesforce. Before taking the chief people role she served as head of recruiting, onboarding and employee learning, overseeing the full candidate lifecycle from hiring through continuing upskilling. Outside the company she serves on the board of the CHRO Academy at the University of California, Berkeley.^[1]

Customer Zero: Salesforce as its own test case

A May 2024 Salesforce article under her byline describes the company using its own products on its workforce. It says Salesforce deployed more than 50 AI-powered tools for employees and prioritized four enterprise-wide solutions based on employee feedback. An Einstein assistant in Slack handled nearly 370,000 queries in one quarter, which the company estimates saved about 50,000 hours.^[6]

The same piece reports that a service-desk tool called Ask Concierge resolved more than 88,000 requests and cut average resolution time from 48 hours to 30 minutes, that 85 percent of employees had used Einstein features to draft goals, and that a redesigned new-hire site with a chatbot reached a 93 percent self-service rate. These are Salesforce's own internal measurements.^[6]

The 4Rs framework

In July 2025 Scardino published the 4Rs as a framework for building a combined human and agent workforce, developed with research partners including the World Economic Forum and LinkedIn according to her Dreamforce comments. The four steps are to redesign work at the task level, reskill people, redeploy talent as roles change and rebalance work between humans and agents.^[3][4]

Her examples include reshaping customer support roles so agents handle routine inquiries, with the company help site resolving more than a million customer requests autonomously. Salesforce identified its top 10 skills for the agentic era, and Career Connect matches employees' skills to learning paths and new roles; she reports that 51 percent of hires in the first quarter of that year were internal.^[4]

She also cites Salesforce research in which daily AI users reported higher productivity at 64 percent, focus at 58 percent and job satisfaction at 81 percent. Employees use agents in Slack for tasks such as scheduling and translating data insights, which she says helps close confidence gaps, and leaders monitor results with Agentforce Command Center.^[4]

Dreamforce 2025: HR should lead

In an interview at Dreamforce 2025 with the publication diginomica, which discloses that Salesforce is a premier partner, Scardino said HR should remove bureaucracy, starting within its own function, and should lead the integration of agents and humans in the workforce. Salesforce held its first CHRO summit at the event.^[3]

She compared AI to spreadsheets, which she said did not eliminate accountants but changed their work toward higher-value tasks. She described a governance council that asks whether a use of AI should be done, not only whether it can be, and said a recruiting agent reviews job applications but does not make hiring decisions, a principle Salesforce set three years earlier of never using AI for hiring decisions.^[3]

On skills, she said Salesforce asks all employees to earn AI fluency credentials, treats understanding data architecture as a core skill for every function, and had publicly committed to reskilling a million Agentblazers. She named new roles including Agent Managers, Agent Designers and Ethical AI Architects, some of which she said did not exist six months earlier.^[3]

April 2026: AI will not transform a company, people will

In an April 29, 2026 article titled AI Won't Transform Your Company. Your People Will, Scardino frames AI adoption as a workforce strategy challenge rather than only a technology one, and argues that conditions, not individual character, determine how people use AI. She reports that every Salesforce employee uses AI agents and has a personal agent through Slackbot, and that hundreds of support engineers were redeployed into new roles such as AI conversation designer and forward-deployed engineer.^[5]

She says software engineers are shifting from writing code line by line to directing AI systems, and sales representatives are using agents for lead research. Her recommendations to other leaders are to redesign work at the task level, build AI fluency across the workforce, embed AI in everyday systems and recognize that technology speeds change while people determine whether it succeeds. Salesforce also published a Workforce Innovation Playbook and an AI Fluency Playbook.^[5]

Why she matters

Scardino leads the people function of a company that sells AI agents to other companies, so Salesforce's own workforce is both her responsibility and a showcase for its products. That makes her one of the most closely watched chief people officers on how to redesign jobs, internal mobility and learning around agents, with the caveat that most of the results she cites are Salesforce's own and have not been independently audited.^[1][5][6]

On The Executive List

Nathalie Scardino is ranked No. 13 on The Executive List (October 2026) in the Chief Human Resources Officers discipline. The Executive List edition records her under Databricks; her verified current role is President and Chief People Officer at Salesforce. The ranking reflects The Executive Review's own editorial Trending Score; it is not an outside award, and placement on the list is never sold. View the October 2026 edition.