How the Process Worked
Salesforce has a formal framework for building a workforce designed for the agentic era called the 4Rs:
- Redesign how work gets done by augmenting human judgment and creativity with AI speed and scale.
- Reskill people by equipping every employee with the skills needed to guide, lead, and scale with agents.
- Redeploy talent by moving beyond static roles so people can flex, adapt, and focus on high-impact work.
- Rebalance work by orchestrating the right partnership between agents and humans, ensuring each does what they do best.
To redeploy these support engineers, Elizabeth Settle, Chief of Staff to Balakrishnan, worked with her business partners to understand the details of the challenge.
There were several key ways customer success engineers — all with deep product knowledge, troubleshooting skills, and customer-facing communications expertise — could move into new roles. Some employees pursued opportunities independently through Career Connect and manager conversations. Others were part of cohort moves, including engineering groups that transitioned together into new roles. Still others were matched to specific openings based on their technical expertise and the receiving team’s needs.
Kristen Chuck took the individual path. She had more than eight years in technical support, most recently as a senior principal swarm lead. She had watched support evolve through multiple reorganizations, so she began taking on projects outside her core responsibilities. She used Salesforce’s Career Connect — an AI-powered internal talent marketplace that provides personalized career guidance, job recommendations, and learning opportunities based on a person’s skills, experiences, and career goals — to identify roles she found interesting. She also got an Agile certification through Salesforce’s education reimbursement program to better understand how product and engineering teams worked.
Those engineers can solve problems without complete information, and they can keep customers engaged even in difficult situations — skills that matter in any customer-facing role.
Salesforce gave people time during work hours to complete any additional training they wanted to do, rather than expecting it to be completed on personal time. (Salesforce is investing in AI fluency for every employee, offering opportunities for experimentation, hands-on learning and trainings, and more.) When roles did open up, candidates were already certified and ready, dramatically shortening ramp time compared with external hires.
Now established as a success architect on the Agentforce Sales Cloud Success Readiness Team, Chuck has become a bridge between customers and product development. “We’re that voice of the customer,” she explained, “bubbling up feedback from support engineers and architects to influence product roadmaps.” She also feels engaged in her new role and is effusive with her praise for the people on her team. “The work we do together really has an impact on the product,” Chuck said.
Ankita Piludaria was initially uncomfortable when she was offered the opportunity to shift from being a support engineer for what was then called Marketing Cloud to taking on a renewals role – an increasingly important function for the company. But she soon embraced the opportunity.
The redeployed workers thrived in new workplace opportunities, and hiring managers frequently reported that the support engineers were some of the best hires they had ever made.
The transition meant learning an entirely new vocabulary — shifting from discussing APIs and SQL queries to talking about uplift pricing and revenue targets. The director of her new team in India ensured training programs accounted for the fact that the incoming engineers were entering entirely new territory. Those individuals spent extended time in training, working on practice opportunities before taking on their full workload. Her manager provided ongoing reassurance as she built competence in an unfamiliar domain.
Before long, Piludaria discovered she had brought a superpower to her new role. When customers cited technical issues as reasons for not renewing contracts, she had answers. “If they have any technical issues, I know where to transfer those cases or how to resolve those issues so they stay with us,” Piludaria said. Her background in Marketing Cloud support ultimately helped her excel at identifying those barriers to renewal — and highlighted her value as a resource for her colleagues.
Sarah Thakkar, who spent seven years as a developer support engineer before moving to a success architect role, felt the process was also validation of the work support engineers had been doing all along. “Leadership saw the value that we brought to support roles and how our skills could be used in other ways,” Thakkar said. “Sometimes those skills go a little bit unnoticed when support is running smoothly.”
Chuck points to another key job skill that support engineers bring to the table (it’s an important life skill too): grit. “Support folks are scrappy,” she explained. “It takes a strong person to stay and make a career in support, because when people are coming to support, it’s not because things are going well most of the time.” The benefits extend across the business. Those engineers are calm under pressure, can solve problems without complete information, and can keep customers engaged even in difficult situations — skills that matter in any customer-facing role.
People leaders also had a critical part to play in helping employees embrace their transferable value. “Here in support, our people have very valuable and critical skills,” said Daniel Bhak, a VP in Sales Cloud Success with 20 years at Salesforce. “They have technical skills because they know our product deeply, and they have customer-facing and customer experience. These are really fundamental skills that apply to many roles.”
This kind of reframing helped people see that their skills weren’t going unused. In fact, they were highly beneficial across the organization.
The Upshot
Workplace change due to AI is not a future concern. The sooner leaders prepare for it, the more options everyone will have. Salesforce continues to shift more resources from reactive support to proactive customer engagement, including onboarding support, implementation health checks, and adoption guidance.
Former support engineers, with their technical depth and customer empathy, are ideal for that proactive work. They know what can go wrong because they’ve fixed it hundreds of times. “Prevention is the best cure,” Balakrishnan said. “How many times have you wanted to call that customer and tell them, ‘Hey, probably you’re not implementing it the right way,’ rather than wait for them to ask a question when the problem actually happens. ”Salesforce’s successful approach was based on a playbook and a philosophy: When technology transforms work, invest in transforming people, too. The cost of keeping them — and their knowledge and expertise — is almost always less than the cost of letting them go.
Go Deeper
- The rise of the forward deployed engineer
- 8 design principles for the Agentic Enterprise
- How does the Agentic Enterprise really work? Lessons from year on