Are AI Agents About to Replace Your Job? | Nancy Xu, Salesforce

Nancy Xu on Building Enterprise AI Agents at Salesforce Agentforce: Hiring for Curiosity, Trust, and Orchestration

In this episode, Nancy Xu shares how her experience as a former startup founder and Stanford PhD shapes her approach to building AI agent teams at Salesforce Agentforce. She explains why non-traditional signals—like what someone is exploring in their browser—can reveal the curiosity and drive that resumes often miss.

The conversation explores how AI agents are changing the future of work, shifting many roles from “producers” who execute tasks to “directors” who define goals and orchestrate agents. Nancy also discusses the importance of trust layers, enterprise governance, and keeping humans in the loop to continuously improve agent performance over time.

Key Topics Covered:

• Unconventional interview questions that surface genuine curiosity and passion
• The three hiring intangibles: relentless curiosity, mastery of craft, and passion
• Why roles will increasingly focus on “what” and “why” as agents handle execution
• Agent orchestration concepts, including MCP and ATA for agent-to-agent collaboration
• Why humans in the loop matter for iterating agent objective functions
• How trust operates as a core value across both startups and large enterprises
• Leadership principles: hire great people, set direction, and give autonomy
• Managing impatience as both a leadership strength and a liability
• The blending of research, product, and engineering in AI-native organizations
• A perspective on why the current era of AI development is a major opportunity for impact

Episode Timestamps:

00:00 - Introduction and unconventional hiring philosophy
01:42 - The Chrome browser tabs question and looking beyond traditional resumes
03:21 - Hiring for curiosity in a world where jobs will transform in two years
05:15 - From producers to directors: The future of work with AI agents
07:18 - Comparing culture at Salesforce Agentforce vs Moon Hub startup
09:28 - Operating from trust: Lessons from Stanford PhD program on autonomy
11:02 - Greatest weakness: Managing impatience as a founder turned enterprise leader
13:14 - Advice for 21-year-olds: Pursue passion and blend across departments
15:54 - Why now is the perfect moment in human history to work on AI
17:10 - Closing thoughts on making positive impact through AI development

About the Guest:

Nancy Xu is a product and engineering leader on the Salesforce Agentforce team and the founder of Moon Hub, an AI-powered talent platform. She holds a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford and applies systems thinking and mathematical rigor to enterprise AI agent development, with a focus on orchestration, trust layers, and human-in-the-loop workflows.

About the Company:

Salesforce Agentforce is an enterprise AI agent platform designed to help organizations deploy autonomous agents across customer service, sales, and operations. It emphasizes enterprise-grade governance, security, and a trust layer that supports compliance at scale, while enabling agent orchestration and keeping humans involved for oversight and strategic direction.