Inside Arundhati Bhattacharya's Playbook for Salesforce India

“India is a hub of innovation and talent for us, and strategically important to our global success. We are thrilled about the ecosystem we are cultivating in India and the role we're playing in fuelling the AI revolution,” says Srini Tallapragada, president & chief engineering officer, Salesforce. “The growth and achievements of Salesforce in India are a testament to our incredible leadership in the region, the potential of the country and growing relevance of India globally. We have a strong growth trajectory and are committed to further investments here."

The company on December 11 announced that its Indian and Asean activities will be a single operating unit, under Bhattacharya’s leadership, effective February 1, 2025. The major countries in this region will include Singapore, Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia, apart from India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.

During its annual World Tour Essentials Mumbai event in June, Salesforce announced that India is expected to create 1.8 million jobs and $88.6 billion in new business revenue by 2028. Currently, Salesforce India has 850 team members in the sales and distribution department, and over 13,000 employees overall across major cities, including Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Gurugram, Mumbai, Pune and Jaipur.

A recent IDC report indicates that the Salesforce economy in India, led by AI, will create close to 11.6 million jobs globally, of which 1.8 million will be in India.

The India Momentum

Salesforce has been a late entrant in the Indian market. “We have a lot of catching up to do,” admits Bhattacharya. Today, Indian enterprises are embracing Salesforce’s products from cloud computing to social media integration, voice technology and AI to enhance productivity and improve customer interactions. Currently, the software giant has both legacy and SME (small and medium enterprises) customers across industries, including HCG, Pidilite, IndiGo, Jaipur Rugs and Amara Raja Energy, among others.

In early 2024, Salesforce announced the launch of its public sector division in India to cater to government agencies and public sector organisations. The company wasn’t present in the public sector in India earlier, since many governments didn’t have cloud policies. “But things have changed and people have realised that cloud is a safe venture, and there can be a lot of applications on the cloud,” says Bhattacharya. “In fact, a number of government applications, the India public stack, much of it sits on the cloud. So, to that extent, the public sector companies have become open to the solutions that we bring to the table.”

The company recently announced the launch of Public Sector Einstein 1 for service—a version of their enterprise AI platform—including CRM, AI and data capabilities. These solutions are also available on a public cloud infrastructure, called Hyperforce, a next-generation infrastructure architecture built for the public cloud. This would help government agencies meet their data residency, data control and security obligations.

According to Salesforce, generative AI could unlock a $1.75 trillion productivity opportunity annually across many functions and levels of government. “Today, citizens expect better, faster service that’s tailored just for them across every platform they use. Building a 360-degree view of citizens to deliver services based on a unified data platform with trust at the core and deep industry expertise will unlock tremendous potential for government organisations,” says Arun Kumar Parameswaran, managing director, sales & distribution, Salesforce India.

Since the last two years, Salesforce India has created 14 industry-wise verticals within the organisation. “We continue providing all our services, but with an industry lens. This makes our implementation a lot better, and subsequent upgradation easier,” explains Bhattacharya.

The 14 verticals include health and lifesciences, auto, manufacturing, travel & hospitality, BFSI—which has multiple sub-verticals such as insurance and wealth management, among others. Adds Bhattacharya: “For India, we are closely looking at the BFSI sector, which is also a point of interest globally, since it is digitally far more mature. Additionally, travel & hospitality and retail are big sectors too.”

“Salesforce has significantly intensified its focus on India's growth trajectory by focusing on industry-aligned solution-building, strengthening dedicated infrastructure and fostering a local partner ecosystem to broaden its presence,” says Rijo George Thomas, senior research manager, IT services research, IDC Asia-Pacific.

To cater to its BFSI clientele, it also launched a Digital Lending solution—a ‘Made in India’ product—for loan origination, which will provide banks and lenders with a platform to digitally approach consumer lending. “This platform is expected to serve customers only within India. It will be a unified platform for intake, underwriter review, and pre-disbursement operations for applications for home, auto and personal loans. This solution will ensure faster time-to-value and reduction in loan processing time,” explains Parameswaran.

Earlier, industries such as manufacturing would only focus on manufacturing. Now they are also looking at servicing, for instance, since it has larger margins. “Our competitors are coming from all kinds of areas… it isn’t necessarily another player in the same area, which is where customer experience plays a big role. Customers want a unified and connected experience. That’s where Salesforce can make a difference across industries,” Bhattacharya tells Forbes India.

For instance, HCG uses a comprehensive ecosystem of solutions, including Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud, Sales Cloud and Services Cloud. “By using the Salesforce Sales Cloud, we are able to reach patients faster. This streamlines resource allocation and saves more time. In fact, the response time for patient inquiries has reduced from 45 minutes to 23 minutes, and over 75 percent of patients are able to stay connected with their doctors after a hospital visit,” says Sudeep Dey, CIO, HCG.

When Salesforce launched in India, the intention was to provide SMEs with the applications they couldn’t afford. Over time, it turned into an enterprise IT company as it scaled up. Currently, the company has a ‘Salesforce Starter Suite’. “This is an all-in-one suite for email outreach, sales, service and commerce tools, built specifically for small growing businesses. It is extremely easy to get started on and has a collection of our products which are packaged to make adoption easy, including our Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud and Service Cloud,” explains Sanket Atal, managing director of technology & operations at Salesforce India. “This helps small businesses focus on their core competencies since all the other peripheral tasks are being taken care of efficiently.”

AI Play

In September 2024, the company launched ‘Agentforce’, which represents the next evolution of Salesforce‌—an agentic layer where AI agents work alongside humans to drive customer success powered by AI, data and action. “Salesforce is democratising AI for businesses of every size and industry, so every company can become an AI enterprise,” says Parameswaran. “Our pioneering formula of CRM+AI+Data+ Trust helps everyone get their data together and embrace AI safely and securely across every team and employee, so they can harness AI to fundamentally transform their business.”

These autonomous agents powered by AI go beyond chatbots and copilots, analyse data, using advanced reasoning abilities to make decisions and take action. For instance, AI agents can do things like resolve customer cases, qualify sales leads and optimise marketing campaigns. This distinguishes the real value of agents from copilots and chatbots that get stuck in a restricted loop—at the same time, freeing up the human employees to focus on what they do best.

“There is a cost of AI today, which is driven by supply and demand related to GPUs (graphics processing units), and it is not going to get solved for the next three years. There is a race for everybody to build GPUs, and there's one player who is so far ahead that whatever supply comes, everybody else is still not going to be sufficient for you to power all the AI in the world," says Parameswaran. The biggest issue that will continue to exist for the next 18 to 36 months will be the unit cost of executing AI at scale. He adds, “How do you deal with data? For the longest time, we have been working with structured data. But now, the innovation we’re working on is, how we can bring both structured and unstructured data to these models, and get them to be a lot more efficient on data cloud.”

With Agentforce, companies don’t need to spend millions of dollars and countless hours to DIY their AI, training and retraining LLMs (large language models). “Instead,” adds Bhattacharya, “it provides a single platform with the apps, the data, the platform service and the agents all tightly integrated to lower operational costs and speed time to value. We believe this is what AI is meant to be.”

Currently, Heathrow Airport and companies like Capita, Secret Escapes and Bionic use Agentforce to augment their employees, expand their workforce and improve customer experiences.

Navigating Challenges

India has an abundance of digital talent. But when it comes to adoption of cutting-edge digital technology, Bhattacharya says, “India is in a bit of a laggard quarter.” The reason is many of India’s core industries are part of the public sector or belong to legacy industries. “These industries often have difficulty in accepting technologies like complete digital transformation—they always ask ‘Why?’. Additionally, they have large technical debts, which means you have to sweat that asset completely before changing to something else,” she explains.

In 2014, as AI and machine learning started picking up, companies realised that bigger storage and compute capacity on premise would be tough, which is when cloud came in. “Yet,” remarks Bhattacharya, “there were a lot of questions around security, audit, inspection etc. But when ChatGPT came along, things started evolving fast—everybody started feeling that they had to get into it without wasting any time.” Digital transformation is now on every board meeting’s agenda.

The startup industry, on the other end, is not laggard. It is digitally mature, and adopts the best and most updated technologies. The company also runs a Salesforce Startup Program to help startups. “The programme has provided unparalleled access to resources, mentorship and a vibrant community of innovators. This support has been instrumental in helping us refine our product, and go-to-market strategy, and ultimately accelerate our growth,” says Rajat Shukla, co-founder of customer insights startup AppEQ.ai.

In addition to supporting to the startup ecosystem, Salesforce in India also works with multiple engineering colleges to offer courses and internships. It runs a platform called Trailhead, which provides training courses. The community has 2 million developers in India—more than any market outside the US.

The larger challenge in India, though, as per Bhattacharya, remains capability building and keeping in sync with regulatory compliance requirements. “I might be innovating very fast, but how do I ensure that my partners keep pace with that? In many cases, we are not implementing what we’re selling… it’s the partner ecosystem that’s doing it. So, the ecosystem needs to evolve as quickly as we evolve, and that is not always easy,” she explains.

Four years into her second career stint, Bhattacharya is only just getting started. “In the near future, I would want Salesforce to be relevant to all industries and empower many more SMEs,” she says.