Salesforce’s Vala Afshar says AI impact could be 10 times bigger than the Industrial Revolution

Artificial intelligence could have an impact “10 times bigger than the Industrial Revolution in one-tenth of the time”, according to Vala Afshar, Chief Digital Evangelist at Salesforce, who warned that companies failing to adopt AI-driven systems risk becoming irrelevant.

Speaking to CNBC-TV18, Afshar said the rapid rise of agentic AI — systems capable of reasoning, executing workflows and learning autonomously — represents the fastest technological shift he has witnessed in his 30-year career in the technology industry.

“We spoke in the middle of 2024, and since then Salesforce has become an agentic enterprise,” Afshar said, adding that the company now has more than 25,000 customers globally using its Agentforce AI solutions.

“I have never experienced the velocity, speed and direction that has led to the fastest-growing product in my company’s history,” he said.

Afshar compared the current AI wave with earlier technology revolutions including cloud computing, mobile internet and social media, but said the scale and pace of change around artificial intelligence is far greater.

Also Read | Companies ignoring AI risk becoming irrelevant, warns Salesforce's Vala Afshar

He said businesses are increasingly moving towards what he described as “digital Darwinism”, where adaptability and AI adoption will determine survival.

“You’re either an agentic business or a dying one,” Afshar said. “You are on a path to irrelevance if you don’t take advantage of this technology.”

These are edited excerpts from the interview.Q: What has surprised you about the pace and momentum of change in the world? We did talk about the fact that AI is going to accelerate tech adoption and change as we know it. But now, at this stage, people are talking about the possibility that, 18 months from now, people sitting in front of a computer could be redundant. Did you anticipate this?

Vala Afshar: We spoke in the middle of 2024, and since then Salesforce has become an agentic enterprise. We have more than 25,000 customers around the globe, including incredible innovation happening here in India, becoming agentic and autonomous businesses.

I've been in tech for 30 years, so I've had the fortune of experiencing the cloud revolution, which Salesforce pioneered when we launched in 1999. We've watched and enabled the mobile revolution, which some argue began in 2007 with the birth of the iPhone, as well as the social revolution, the Internet of Things, data, and advanced analytics.

I have never experienced the velocity, speed, and direction that has led to the fastest-growing product in my company's history, which is our Agentforce product and our agentic AI solutions capability, along with the incredible opportunity to feed agents with trusted data.

When I look at our data and our agentic business, it is among the most successful product lines in the history of the company, with tens of thousands of companies now using it.

So yes, I think you and I did a good job of predicting this agentic future. I think we both talked about the fact that this could be electricity for the 21st century.

Some would argue that when we talk specifically about AI — agentic and physical — its impact could be 10 times bigger than the Industrial Revolution in one-tenth of the time. That's a profound statement in terms of what's ahead of us, and I think it's only the beginning.

One of the reasons why I'm so delighted to be here is that tomorrow I get to spend time with 2,000 men and women who are changing the landscape not just of India, but of the globe, in terms of the adoption of innovation, new business models, and finding ways not only to remain relevant but also to thrive and grow in this hyper-converged sense of uncertainty that we're all part of.

As much as I'm excited about the technology, when I think about converged uncertainty — tariffs, multiple wars, climate change, powerful new technology, and questions around the future of business and work — this is a time when you need to be grounded in your core values, learn through first principles, and adapt as fast as you can.

Q: You have previously said — and we talked about this as well — that if you're not at the forefront of adopting AI, then you face an existential question at this point in time, given where we find ourselves. Do you believe more companies are now at risk not just of being left behind, but of facing existential uncertainty, than they were two years ago?

Vala Afshar: I do. Right after our conversation, I was inspired to work on my next book.

The subtitle of the book says, “The Fittest Companies.” I'm reminded of Darwin and “survival of the fittest.” Darwin didn't say you had to be the strongest. He said if you had thick fur, you were more likely to survive the winter. So, it was about adaptability.

The subtitle says, “The Fittest Companies,” because I believe we're now talking about digital Darwinism. The fittest companies adopt an AI-first strategy and digital labour.

You're not an autonomous business or an agentic enterprise if you don't have digital labour.

Today, when we talk about hybrid work, perhaps in the past that referred to where you worked — home or office. Hybrid work today is humans and AI co-creating value at the speed of need.

Your ability to anticipate, your ability to scale, and the level of intelligence introduced through AI systems matter enormously. And I'm very deliberate when I say “system” because this is not a discussion about language models alone. A language model is a component within a system that agents use to reason, create, execute complex business workflows, adapt, and learn with every iteration. That requires a system.

At Salesforce, that system consists of four subsystems. There is much more than just one component that brings this capability to life.

To get back to your question, you're either an agentic business or a dying one. You are on a path to irrelevance if you don't take advantage of this technology. That's my belief, rooted in evidence.

Having spent 30 years building technology, I've never witnessed anything as powerful or impactful as the waves we're seeing in artificial intelligence — predictive machine learning, generative AI, and now agentic and physical AI.

By physical AI, I mean smart drones, autonomous vehicles, robots, humanoid robots, and even smart wearables. Everything I can do with my Salesforce platform, I can now do using smart glasses. I can simply speak to it and look at my customer service cases, marketing opportunities, and sales leads.

Things are now conversational and multimodal, and you can literally wear your agent today, which is not something I thought was possible even a few years ago.

Q: There are a lot of very important statements coming from you there, and I want to unpack them because each one is individually complex. Let's start with digital Darwinism and your point that if you're not agentic, you're a dying business. What does this mean for the workforce when you talk about a hybrid workforce where digital labour and human labour work together? What are we talking about in terms of numbers? Because there is mixed messaging, for instance from Salesforce. Mark Benioff says the company is hiring 1,000 graduates and interns, but at the same time Salesforce has restructured and laid off a couple of thousand people over the last two years. We're also seeing global tech companies restructure, slow hiring, or lay off thousands of employees. So what does this mean for the human workforce before we even talk about digital labour?

Vala Afshar: That's a great question, and it's top of mind for everybody. You and I spoke two years ago. Since then, Salesforce has added more than 20,000 employees. From 2024 to 2026, I believe we reached around 85,000 employees globally. I joined 10 years ago when the company had just over 15,000 employees.

So the company continues to invest in human capital, human labour, and human talent.

Having said that, I think businesses will face several realities over the next decade when it comes to this capital-T transformation. Becoming an agentic enterprise is not just about modernising legacy processes. It's a major transformation.

The first is redesigning the systems. You're going to onboard agents that coexist with humans to perform certain tasks, and that requires redesigning processes.

Not every task in business today needs to be agentified, but if you're using reasoning, dealing with complexity, or handling deterministic and repetitive work, it's wasteful to have humans focused on low-value tasks.

We're going to see massive redesigns across entire businesses.

When you successfully redesign and deploy an agent, one of the first realisations — and this is a good one — is that you've freed up human talent to work on higher-value activities.

Sometimes that higher-value work lies outside their current domain. At Salesforce, when we redesigned help.salesforce.com — the website customers use globally for support — we onboarded agents that resolved cases more successfully than anything we'd experienced in the company's 27-year history.

We've resolved more than 3.5 million cases in the last 16 months with Agentforce.

That allowed us to free up the people performing those functions, leading to the internal hiring of around 3,000 individuals. Those employees became forward deployment engineers, solutions engineers, architects, sales professionals, programmers, professional services experts, and technology training leaders.

Some transitioned immediately because they already had strong skills. The majority required reskilling.

So the second “R” is reskill. Once people gain the necessary skills, you redeploy them into new roles.

And by the way, they're often excited because these are more creative, more complex, and better-compensated jobs requiring strategic thinking rather than repetitive work.

Redeploying talent also has financial implications. You need to restructure budgets and organisational models. Budgets may move from customer service to engineering, sales, or marketing. You may even require less middle management because work is increasingly done through humans working alongside digital labour.

So when we talk about redesigning, reskilling, redeploying, and restructuring, another major realisation emerges: reclaiming latent value.

When we freed up human talent because help.salesforce.com was being managed by agents, we realised we lacked support in six to eight languages across important growth markets.

Tomorrow at Agentforce Mumbai, we're going to announce Agentforce Voice support for Hindi. 53% of this country uses that language. We've operated in India since 2001, yet we didn't support the language spoken by the majority of the population.

Becoming an agentic enterprise allowed us to recognise signals we had ignored in the past — buying signals, marketing signals, and capability gaps — and address high-value opportunities that previously went unattended.

So the journey involves redesigning, reskilling, redeploying, restructuring, and reclaiming latent value.

In summary, since we last spoke, I've realised this isn't just about technology transformation. It's about relational transformation — how we build relationships among people, between people and agents, and even between agents themselves.

Believe it or not, we now have super-agents functioning as managers overseeing subordinate agents in the way we run our business.

The world is changing very quickly, but one thing remains true: success has always been based on the quality of relationships we have. After all, the “R” in CRM stands for relationships.

This is a tremendous opportunity for businesses not only to rethink technology transformation, but also to ensure people remain at the centre.

We don't want to lose human agency. Salesforce doesn't want to build products that displace humans. We want humans and AI agents to co-create value in a personalised, intelligent, and fast manner.

That's how we maintain relevance.

Thankfully, I can say the number of employees at Salesforce continues to grow. We will always be restructuring and reskilling because that's the game we have to play in order to have the right athletes on the pitch scoring for us.

We've delivered record performance since the last time we spoke, and we're fortunate that companies around the world continue to see value in the solutions we're building. That's what inspires us.

Q: You're reiterating what Mark Benioff has said — that you don't want to displace people, but augment them with digital labour. But how do you respond to the everyday graduate listening to podcasts and interviews where people from the tech world are talking about a white-collar bloodbath? Somebody graduating from college today is being told they may not be relevant in 18 months. How are they supposed to approach the job market?

Vala Afshar: That's a great question. When companies try to figure out the shape and form of this transition, I think what we're often seeing is a lack of imagination among leaders regarding where human talent can be redeployed once agentic capabilities are onboarded.

Based on my research, there are six different types of latent value companies can identify, and this ultimately comes down to waste in business.

There's a lot of waste in business.

We conduct Slack Future of Work research annually to understand where businesses can be more optimised and where employees can experience more joy at work.

Our latest research shows there is roughly 40% waste across businesses in aggregate.

We found that sales leaders spend only 28% of their time actually educating, inspiring, and driving action — in other words, selling. The remaining 72% is spent on planning, back-office tasks, meetings, preparation, and administrative work.

In marketing, when a lead becomes a marketing-qualified lead, it means the marketer believes the lead has shown sufficient intent to potentially convert into a sale. Yet only 17% of marketing-qualified leads become sales-qualified leads. More than eight out of 10 effectively disappear.

So what is waste?

In my research, waste occurs anytime you assign the wrong resource to a task, overutilise a resource, or underutilise a resource.

As companies onboard agents, they're recognising that they often have the wrong resources assigned to certain tasks.

You may have a graduate from Stanford or a top Indian university performing repetitive, mundane work. That's wasteful and underutilises talent.

Or you may be overutilising someone by making them work excessively hard on low-value repetitive tasks that machine learning systems can now perform far more efficiently.

Businesses are going to become much smarter about how they manage resources.

If leaders are imaginative enough, they'll realise that most businesses ignore valuable signals from employees, customers, partners, and communities.

AI allows us to become more attuned to creating beautiful experiences, generational wealth, and meaningful value. And that means we'll be able to identify impactful work not only for people, but for our hybrid work environments as well.