Indian firms moving AI from pilots towards deployment: Salesforce

Arundhati Bhattacharya, chairperson and chief executive officer (CEO), Salesforce India (Photo: Kamlesh Pednekar)

Salesforce sees India entering a phase of wider enterprise AI adoption, with companies moving beyond experimentation to production deployments and the country offering significant "white space" for digital and agentic AI growth, President and CEO, South Asia, Arundhati Bhattacharya, said.

In an interview to PTI, she affirmed the shift by Indian firms, sharing that Salesforce will continue to invest in physical infrastructure, upskilling Indian talent and recruitment.

"So I would say that yes, they (Indian companies) are moving towards putting things in production," Bhattacharya said, responding to a question on whether Indian firms were moving towards large-scale deployment after experimenting with generative AI and AI agents.

Elaborating on Salesforce's India plans, Bhattacharya said a new tower in Bengaluru is expected to come on stream next calendar year as one of its investments in the country.

"We have already invested in a tower in Bangalore, and that should be coming on stream sometime next calendar year. So that'll be a big one. And as for people, we continue to invest in our people. So whether it be in upskilling them, whether it be recruiting them, all of that goes on," Bhattacharya said on the sidelines of the Dreamforce Conference here.

Bhattacharya said Salesforce would pursue a combination of internal innovation and acquisitions to bring new capabilities to customers, citing its global acquisitions of customer-agent company Fin and data management firm Informatica.

"We will innovate internally. We will buy what is the best inorganically, put it all together along with our trust layer, so that you don't have these problems about security, and then bring them back," she said.

Salesforce's President and Chief Platform and Engineering Officer Rohan Kumar said the company's vision for the "agentic enterprise" rests on a four-layer architecture comprising Data 360, Customer 360, Agentforce and AIforce.

Kumar said the growing use of autonomous agents would also require enterprises to establish stronger systems for security, governance, cost control and monitoring.

"The agents are great, but imagine if you had a million agents in your enterprise; you have to manage them. How do you know that they're not going rogue? You have to secure them, and you have to create the right data layer with business context," he said.

According to Kumar, IT leaders would increasingly be responsible for managing the number, activity and cost of agents, while security teams would have to establish agent identities and monitor their actions.

"To your question, I do believe that the IT leaders and the security leaders inside an organisation are going to take on these newer roles. It's already happening," he observed.

Arun Parameswaran, EVP and Managing Director, Sales and Distribution (South Asia), said Salesforce was seeing companies move rapidly from AI experimentation to production, particularly in financial services.