As Salesforce further promotes its vision of an agentic workforce, it must equip the next generation of builders with the necessary knowledge to unleash these AI bots. To accomplish this, the enterprise tech firm has turned to a familiar playbook while also banking heavily on its Trailhead education platform. It has set an ambitious goal: Recruit more than one million so-called Agentblazers by the end of 2025.
“We’re in the biggest workforce transformation of our lifetime as we unlock the power of agents and humans working together,” remarked Nathalie Scardino, Salesforce’s Chief People Officer, in a statement. “Every organization will be called to redesign their people strategies, redeploy talent to support a future workforce with agents, and reskill employees—and every employee will need to lean in on human, business, and agent skills to drive success for themselves and for their customers.”
Salesforce’s Senior Vice President for the Trailblazer community, Leah McGowen-Hare, agreed, declaring “tomorrow’s jobs belong to today’s learners” at this month’s TDX conference. While her and Scardino’s statements highlight Salesforce’s strong commitment to workforce development, they also aim to reassure people about its AI initiatives. In truth, a lot is riding on Salesforce’s Agentforce success.
Disclosure: Salesforce invited me to attend TDX as its guest, paying for my expenses. The company, in no way, dictated the content of this post. These are my words.The company launched its agentic development platform, Agentforce, in October. Since then, it has made entreaties to key audiences to drive interest. It has hosted World Tours to demonstrate its potential to customers, hyped up its value to investors, and made it accessible to developers. But, simply making the tools available isn’t enough. Salesforce needs to educate users on how to build on its platform and become more informed about AI.
That’s why the company is doubling down on its Trailhead learning offering. Immediately after introducing Agentforce, Salesforce announced that all its premium AI courses and certifications would be free to all users through the end of 2025. But that was just the beginning—Salesforce is now setting a bold target: recruiting one million Agentblazers.
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Growth Hacking the Salesforce Agentblazer
“We always like to have an ambitious goal,” McGowen-Hare explained to me on the sidelines of TDX. “If we really want to inspire people, we have to put a goal out there that will make people go, ‘whoa…let me be a part of that movement.’ I think part of it was motivating others to be a part of this movement because like [Alexander] Hamilton said, it’s more than a moment. This is a movement.”
Although conceding the lofty target, she revealed multiple reasons for the one million figure. First, the figure is more noteworthy than an arbitrary amount like 375,000; second, it could be viewed symbolically, demonstrating Salesforce’s level of interest. Regardless, McGowen-Hare feels her feet are being held to the fire and said she’s committed to meeting that goal.
Over a decade ago, Salesforce introduced Trailhead. This program provides developers and administrators with a “guided, learning path through the key features of Salesforce, using a set of interactive, online tutorials.” It aimed to prepare workers for the millions of jobs created around the Salesforce ecosystem. Now, the company believes it can lead the way in training people for AI and digital labor, turning those so-called Trailblazers into Agentblazers.
Salesforce isn’t building Agentblazers from the ground up. As McGowen-Hare put it, “Agentblazers are birthed from Trailblazers,” emphasizing that the company’s existing Trailblazer community can seamlessly transition into this new role. While anyone can jump into AI courses on Trailhead, she notes that a foundational understanding of Salesforce is essential.
“An Agentblazer can be a Trailblazer who is now stepping into the realm of agentic app development and beginning to learn,” McGowen-Hare pointed out. She acknowledged that the term “Agentblazer” covers a broad spectrum, ranging from beginners and non-coders to those skilled in prompt engineering or agent development.
When asked how Salesforce qualifies when someone is an Agentblazer, McGowen-Hare stated that certification is not a requisite for the designation. Instead, if you’ve taken a Trailhead AI course, built an agent on the platform, attended an Agentforce World Tour, or participated in the Agentblazer community Slack channel, you’re considered an Agentblazer.
A New Way to ‘Jumpstart’ AI Learning
Truthfully, that Agentblazer definition is a loose one. It doesn’t adequately qualify how much AI knowledge someone has gained by attending an event, taking a course, or participating in an online community. It can be overwhelming to sort through the plethora of courses on Trailhead. How do you maximize your education to ensure you’re taking the right classes to prepare you for the agentic future? Recognizing the need to make its Trailhead courses more engaging, Salesforce recently introduced Agentblazer Status—a feature that provides users with a structured learning path toward certification.
There are three status levels, each suited to your learning experience. The first is Agentblazer Champion, which teaches AI and Agentforce fundamentals. Learners will also better understand Salesforce’s Data Cloud product and governance best practices. They’ll then start building their first agent.
The next level is Agentblazer Innovator, a path to help you identify use cases for these bots in your business. Learners will develop custom agents using Salesforce’s Agent Builder and set up Agentforce for Service and Sales.
Finally, the last level is Agentblazer Legend. McGowen-Hare describes it as a “heavy” effort that requires “elbow grease.” Ultimately, it leads to earning your Agentforce Specialist certification after being taught how to manage and customize the agentic platform across the entire AI lifecycle.
Agentblazer Champion and Innovator statuses are already available, while Legend status is coming soon. McGowen-Hare revealed a “huge” uptick in adopting the AI courses on Trailhead, saying more than 13,000 people signed up for Agentblazer Champion since it launched a few weeks ago. She added that more than 500 people have enrolled in Agentblazer Innovator.
Salesforce believes that making its courses “more palatable” and “more digestible ” will encourage greater learning. That’s the goal of the new Agentblazer Statuses.
Expanding AI Education Access Beyond Trailhead
Trailhead isn’t the only way Salesforce is raising its army of Agentblazers. As McGowen-Hare told me, the company is doubling down on events, especially in underrepresented communities. It’s a notable choice, especially since Salesforce itself has recently eliminated diversity hiring targets.
“Our events are everywhere, so if you’re going to an event and you do a hands-on workshop there, if you go to one of our Agentforce Now tours…we’ve invested in our community run their own sort-of many Dreamforces…We’re having our teams go out there and do hands-on workshops,” she shared. “I think the real energy is behind pushing people to get back to learning and getting hands-on with the technology. It’s not like I talk about it, but actually being in there and building.”
McGowen-Hare highlighted Salesforce’s commitment to reaching underrepresented and disadvantaged communities. She hopes to expand partnerships with workforce development programs—supporting mothers returning to work and organizations training refugees—to ensure no one is left behind in the AI revolution.
Salesforce is also returning to its bag of tricks to garner interest in the platform and ideate creative use cases. The firm is hosting an Agentforce hackathon in which the most innovative solution could win a $50,000 prize. Events like this aren’t new—Salesforce hosted them early in its 26-year existence. However, while previous contests heavily involved traditional developers, in the AI era, hackathons like this may be more diverse, with a mixture of no-code, low-code, and pro-code developers. In addition, while Salesforce’s CRM platform has a commanding market lead, Agentforce is still in its infancy and faces stiff competition. Hackathons, community outreach, and Trailhead marketing could do much to help Salesforce with the user developer land grab.
Showing Value Through Education
Chief executive Marc Benioff has criticized Microsoft’s Copilot offering, claiming customers aren’t finding value in the AI chatbot. Salesforce has a lot at stake in ensuring Benioff’s vision becomes a reality, both from its big technology bet and from an investment point of view. Trailhead will be crucial in proving that Agentforce can deliver tangible returns on investment. Unlike the “Field of Dreams” approach—where simply building something guarantees success—customers must be equipped with the right knowledge, from AI terminology to prompt engineering and other skills this era requires. Without proper education, they risk building underperforming agents, leaving them frustrated and unsure of what went wrong.
Recognizing this challenge, Salesforce is positioning Trailhead as a key solution to bridge the AI skills gap. McGowen-Hare sees this education initiative as more than just an onboarding tool—it’s a way to make AI accessible to a broader audience. While multiple education platforms exist, from Coursera and LinkedIn Learning to Jasper and traditional academic institutions, at the end of the day, learners must decide if they’ve received any real value. “Did you leave that course learning something you didn’t learn before?” she asked. McGowen-Hare argued that Salesforce’s Trailhead is unique: “We’re democratizing access so anybody can learn. Trailhead is ungated. You can get in there and learn. You don’t need a license, you don’t need to be a customer, and you don’t need to pay anything to actually get into the Salesforce product and build. Not everybody’s doing that.”
By providing structured learning paths, hands-on workshops, and real-world applications through events and hackathons, Salesforce aims to ensure that companies don’t just implement AI but leverage it effectively. The success of Agentforce—and, by extension, Salesforce’s broader AI ambitions—hinges on its ability to transform eager learners into skilled Agentblazers who can confidently build, deploy, and optimize AI-powered solutions.
Featured Image: Salesforce Agentblazers attend the company's TDX conference in San Francisco, CA, on March 5, 2025. Photo credit: Ken Yeung
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