Scaling AI, keeping work human

Scaling AI, keeping work human

At Dreamforce, Salesforce’s annual community tech event, Adecco Group CEO Denis Machuel shared how AI is reshaping recruitment by giving recruiters more time for human connection. Denis' principle: AI should happen with people, not to people.

Adecco Group CEO Denis Machuel joined Salesforce Chair and CEO Marc Benioff on the main Dreamforce keynote stage in San Francisco, alongside the CEOs of Anthropic, NVIDIA and Siemens, to talk about how companies can scale AI without losing what makes work human.

Adecco Group came to that conversation with 18 months of experience putting AI to work including in the recruitment process that lies at the heart of what we do.

That was the experience Denis brought to the stage. Rather than beginning with the easiest processes to automate, the Adecco Group started with recruitment itself – work built around human relationships.

“We are a people company: recruitment is about people engaging with people,” Denis said. “We didn't start where it was easy. We started on what mattered most.”

Agentic AI has been put to work across recruitment workflows in ten countries, representing half of Adecco's business revenue. In those markets, recruiters are saving an estimated 25-35% of their time.

For Denis, what happens to that time matters more than the saving itself.

“What they use that time for is to create much more qualitative conversations with clients, and with candidates,” he said. “When you do that, you grow the business.”

That gets to the heart of Adecco Group's approach. Efficiency has value when it gives people more time for the parts of the job where human judgement, relationships and conversation matter most.

It is also the thinking behind hybrid workforce orchestration – designing work so that people, AI agents and automation each play the role where they add most value – and the agility advantage: the idea that the organisations best placed to succeed will be those able to adapt quickly as technology changes.

On stage, Denis linked that directly to the thinking behind r.Potential, developed with Salesforce.

“We had a common vision that AI had to happen with people and not to people,” he said. “If we want to measure and bring the returns, people cannot be an afterthought. We have a common responsibility to create a human-centric AI.”

The same question is now facing many of our clients: not simply whether to adopt AI, but how to decide which work should move to AI, which should be augmented by it and where people remain essential.

“Many clients still struggle about how they can scale AI,” Machuel said.

Getting those choices right is what will ultimately determine whether AI delivers more than efficiency alone.

Building on the success of the implementation of agents for recruitment, the company took Dreamforce as the opportunity to announce the global rollout of Salesforce's Agentforce Coworker across more than 40 countries, bringing agentic AI into the daily workflows of 27,000 Adecco Group sales professionals and recruiters. This provides a single interface for sales professionals and recruiters to access tools that were spread across dozens of systems.

For more detail on the Agentforce Coworker rollout, including the scale of the deployment and the numbers behind it, read the full announcement here.