Salesforce Gives the Gift of Free AI Trailhead Courses Through 2025

Signage for Salesforce's Trailhead on display at the company's Dreamforce 2016 conference in San Francisco, CA. Photo credit: Ken Yeung
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"The AI Economy," a newsletter exploring AI's impact on business, work, society and tech.
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This is my final dispatch from Dreamforce 2024. The conference did live up to the hype Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff promised: We’d all be talking about artificial intelligence.

For this issue of “The AI Economy,” read about how Salesforce is preparing non-technical workers to adapt to this third wave of AI. Although Agentforce requires little to no coding to operate, it doesn’t mean employees should stop improving their skills and, in doing so, create a more receptive response towards AI.

In other Salesforce news, Benioff responds to Klarna ditching its SaaS software in favor of AI. Plus, learn what he’s talking about when he calls for the end of AI “hypnosis.”

The AI agent landscape isn’t just about Salesforce (I know, right?). I also explore what HubSpot, Oracle, Workday, and others have been cooking up.

Finally, check out the list of AI headlines you may have missed from this week.

Disclosure: I attended Dreamforce as a Salesforce guest, and the company covered my expenses. Salesforce in no way dictated the content of this post. These are my words.

The Prompt

Salesforce didn’t stop with the launch of Agentforce this week. The enterprise tech giant doubled down on its AI push by introducing new AI features across its product suite and spotlighting its popular online learning platform, Trailhead, as a key to driving its AI success. After all, launching AI tools is one thing, but if no one has the skills needed to use them, what’s the point? To make this knowledge broadly accessible, Salesforce is electing to make its premium AI courses and AI certifications free to all users.

“Historically, Trailhead has been focused on free self-service training, and then we’ve had paid offerings for instructor-led classes. We feel that AI is such a game-changer and so important that we’re making our AI instructor-led classes free until the end of next year,” Jim Roth, Salesforce’s president of customer success, tells me. “We’re also making certification vouchers free for AI certs until the end of next year. So it’s an over $50 million investment…and that’s a big unlock.”

On the one hand, Salesforce is making it financially viable for those looking to upskill their career and be competitive in this AI economy to do so. This announcement also keeps Trailhead at the top of people’s minds when considering e-learning software, such as LinkedIn Learning and Coursera. In addition, it could be a helpful resource for organizations seeking to provide training to workers wanting to know more about AI or have been waiting for a sign of encouragement from management that it’s okay to learn about the technology.

However, Trailhead skills learned are only partially transferrable because users will primarily be learning based on the Salesforce ecosystem.

“It’s only applicable to Salesforce,” Rebecca Wettemann, principal analyst at Valoir, states when asked if AI knowledge gleaned from Trailhead could transfer to a competing platform like ServiceNow, Oracle or HubSpot. “These platforms are going to be different enough…just like you wouldn’t naturally be able to jump to be a ServiceNow admin if you were a Salesforce admin, you’re going to need more specialized knowledge.”

By making Trailhead’s AI content free for everyone, Salesforce could also transform some of its Trailblazers into “Agentblazers”—advocates of its AI initiatives eager to leverage the technology for innovation. In doing so, Salesforce would grow its evangelist community.

“The role of Trailhead is more important than ever… his technology is so transformational that more and more people need to learn about it,” Roth says. “People that don’t really understand Trailhead think it’s online learning—I read some content or watch a video and take a quiz. But the real power is unlocking the hands-on capabilities of being able to actually play with the technology. And we run challenges, and there are some people who actually configure things in the product, and then we can run test scripts against it to say, ‘Did you actually pass the test?’ That is the best way to learn the tech. It’s one thing to read about the technology. It’s another…to actually use the technology. And so we think that is going to be more powerful than ever.”

Since June 2023, more than 2.6 million AI and data badges have been earned on the platform. More AI courses are coming in time for Agentforce’s general availability on October 23.

Roth also revealed that Salesforce aims to better integrate Trailhead with its certification programs, including those from legacy companies it has acquired. Over the next year, the company aims to unify all online learning onto a single platform, ensuring a consistent experience across its entire product suite.

To aid its mission of helping people reskill around AI, Salesforce also plans to open more so-called AI Centers in 2025. The first opened in June in London. Additional ones are scheduled, starting with San Francisco and then Chicago, Tokyo and Syndey. Each one will host in-person courses offered through Trailhead and become a meeting place for industry experts, Salesforce partners, and customers to work on AI innovations.

Editor’s Note

“The AI Economy” will be off next week due to personal travel. However, follow me on Flipboard, as I’ll continue to curate noteworthy AI news there. The newsletter will return the week of Sept. 30.

Stories Wanted

🚀 Seeking captivating stories for “The AI Economy” newsletter! If you’re immersed in AI – whether through building, investing, or witnessing intriguing developments – I want to hear from you! 🌐✨

Drop me a message or share your insights in the comments below.

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Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff speaks at a press conference after giving his Dreamforce keynote on Sept. 17, 2024. Photo credit: Ken Yeung/TheLetterTwo.com
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff speaks at a press conference after giving his Dreamforce keynote on Sept. 17, 2024. Photo credit: Ken Yeung/TheLetterTwo.com

Time to End ‘Hypnosis’ Around AI

Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff is challenging his competitors to stop doing “hypnosis” around AI and simply give customers the ability to properly evaluate what tools will work for them. Multiple times during his Dreamforce keynote and the follow-up press conference, the charismatic executive held no punches, describing Microsoft’s Copilot as the next incarnation of Clippy and that it can’t generate the results as promised.

Today’s customers are swept up in the hype and excitement vendors create around AI, only to face disappointment when the technology fails to deliver real-world results. Instead, Benioff says vendors should “let the customer at it”: “Let them try it. Let them test the actual numbers, what works and what does not work, and then in front of as many customers as possible.”

▶️ Read more about Benioff’s comment about AI ‘hypnosis’ (My Two Cents)

Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski. Photo credit: Klarna
Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski. Photo credit: Klarna

Benioff Responds to Klarna Dropping Salesforce, Workday

Fintech firm Klarna is shifting away from SaaS platforms like Salesforce and Workday, opting to streamline its operations with its own AI. The decision caught the attention of Salesforce’s Marc Benioff, who openly questioned whether Klarna’s approach would lead to success. Without a CRM platform, how does Klarna plan to manage and share its information while also ensuring the data is in compliance? Benioff also stated that while AI will automate some parts of work, human beings will still be needed.

▶️ Read more about why Klarna is betting on AI over SaaS software (My Two Cents)

In Non-Salesforce-Related News…

With the top CRM platform company making so much noise, it’s easy to forget that other tech conferences have happened. Put simply, Salesforce isn’t the only enterprise tech provider that has made an AI announcement.

Here’s a look at some of the headlines from several recent enterprise conferences…

At its Inbound conference, rival HubSpot launched Breeze Intelligence, its version of AI equipped with a copilot, agents, and customer intelligence. It’s billed as “easy-to-use” and requires no technical expertise. The introduction comes five months after HubSpot released a litany of AI-powered features for its sales and marketing platform, specifically Service Hub.

Oracle held its CloudWorld event in early September and had multiple reveals, from the addition of a Gen AI-powered developer assistant to its Fusion Data Intelligence service to partnering with Database 23ai to help with Gen AI-based app development, moving Code Assist to beta, promoting its Gen AI RAG Agent to general availability, and expanding its multi-cloud and distributed cloud partnership with AWS.

Enterprise resource planning software provider Workday offers AI agents to help users do more work faster. Powered by the company’s Workday Illuminate platform, these agents are trained to automate recruitment, human resource management, expense reporting, succession planning and more. Workday also announced its acquisition of Evisort, which will boost its document intelligence.

Quote This

“We’re going to have supervision. Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times, and if there’s a problem, AI will report that problem and report it to the appropriate person. Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.”

— Oracle founder Larry Ellison on his expectation that AI will eventually power massive law enforcement surveillance networks (TechCrunch)

This Week’s AI News

🏭 Industry Insights

🤖 General AI and Machine Learning

✏️ Generative AI

🛒 Retail and Commerce

☁️ Enterprise

⚙️ Hardware and Robotics

🔬 Science and Breakthroughs

💼 Business and Marketing

📺 Media and Entertainment

💰 Funding

⚖️ Copyright and Regulatory Issues

💥 Disruption and Misinformation

🔎 Opinions, Analysis and Research

End Output

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