In a job interview, it's incumbent on the candidate to make a good first impression. On the first day of employment, the tables are turned and the employer must make a good first impression on its new hire. This is why the employee onboarding experience is so important. Think back to your last onboarding experience. Was your new boss available and accessible? Did they provide clear guidance throughout your first day, week, month or ninety days? Did they give you pointers on wading through the sea of HR-related documentation? Or were you stuck on an unfamiliar computer, idly clicking through a welcome-to-the-company slide deck and thinking, "I've made a terrible mistake?"
Ensuring the employee onboarding experience is a good one is a big job It may ask a lot of multiple departments. Yesterday’s joint announcement from Workday and Salesforce offers a glimpse of the future of onboarding. The two companies announced a partnership that will do the following:
This team-up will help Salesforce continue to build the case that Slack is the type of collaborative platform where employees can do both the work related to their jobs and the work related to being an employee in an organization. In the case of the former, Slack's making moves into project management with its Slack Lists -- a new feature that helps build out action items based on conversations in Slack channels.
In the case of doing the work that comes from being an employee, this jumped out in both the company pre-briefing and the press release: the AI employee service agent promises to help with onboarding, from coordinating paperwork, to getting new employees the equipment and resources they need, to directing new hires to the appropriate training.
Like any other AI agent-crafted workflow meant to offload formerly-people-performed tasks, turning onboarding into an AI agent-driven process could go very right or very wrong.
Having an AI agent that provides both a structured onboarding experience and tireless responsiveness to questions could be great for new hires; the process of setting everything up could be great for organizations too, because it forces the organization to be thorough and intentional in how they work within Salesforce and Workday to craft the experience.
However, since an automated onboarding process would be a new hire's first exposure to the company, it's important to be mindful of how it might feel to start a job and spend the first half of the first day pointing, clicking and typing with only an AI agent to guide you.
Salesforce says it will be providing further demonstrations of its employee agent at the upcoming Dreamforce event. It will be interesting to see what kind of first impression the Agentforce employee service agent makes -- and how that could shape an employee's first impression of their new workplace.
