Tech & AI
Adecco Group is deploying Salesforce’s Agentforce Coworker to 27,000 employees across more than 40 countries, following successful pilot programs in the UK and France. The staffing giant announced the global rollout on September 15, marking a significant step in integrating agentic AI into its daily operations. Agentforce Coworker, Salesforce’s AI assistant for enterprise staff, is built into the Salesforce platform and powered by Anthropic’s Claude. It supports both sales and recruitment activities, including client and candidate engagement. For Adecco’s teams, the tool provides a unified access point to data, systems, and organizational knowledge that was previously scattered across numerous applications. Sales staff and recruiters can identify priority prospects, prepare sales briefs, enrich prospect data, and monitor lead status across teams. Recruiters can also select candidates and initiate pre-screening, recruiter, or onboarding agents. The system draws on context from over 2.5 million agent-candidate interactions recorded since April 2025. Adecco Group CEO Denis Machuel emphasized that the rollout gives teams a single interface containing candidate history and client context at critical decision points. “Our pilot showed strong adoption in a matter of days,” he said. The September statement did not include specific usage or productivity metrics from the UK and France pilots. The global deployment follows a multi-year agreement signed with Salesforce in March, running through 2027, granting unlimited global access to Agentforce 360 under an Agentic Enterprise License Agreement. At the time, Adecco stated the deal supported its goal for more than half of its revenues to be powered by agentic AI by the end of 2026. The company has already deployed agentic AI across recruitment workflows in ten countries, representing 50% of Adecco business revenues, though the statement does not clarify whether this refers to group or business unit revenue.
In the UK, where Adecco had deployed Agentforce 360 agents in parts of its recruitment process, the group reported in March that the agents helped generate 15% time savings, along with shorter time-to-fill, higher fill rates, and lower cost-to-serve. The March statement referred to roughly 27,000 recruiters, while the September statement describes the 27,000 people covered by the rollout as employees. Speaking at the Dreamforce 2026 keynote in San Francisco, Machuel said recruiters have saved 35% to 40% of their time through agentic AI, according to CX Today. He also noted the business has placed 20,000 more people so far this year, attributing this to better conversations. These company-provided figures have not been independently verified. CX Today also reported 2.6 million agent interactions this year, while Adecco’s September statement cites over 2.5 million since April 2025; the two figures cover different periods, and neither source explains how interactions are counted. The group also demonstrated Ada, its recruiting voice agent built on Agentforce Voice. In a demo, a caller learned why their application was paused, provided a new certification number, had it verified, and saw the application updated during the call. Machuel described the approach as deploying AI alongside people rather than imposing it on them. “AI had to happen with people and not to people,” he said during the keynote. Adecco’s September statement does not set a timeline for completing the 40-country rollout. In March, the group said its next phase would add more agents in the UK and expand implementation in France and other key markets, as well as extend agentic capability across its nearshore and offshore hubs in India, Poland, Mexico, and Morocco.