Indian firms moving AI from pilots towards deployment: Salesforce

San Francisco, Sep 20 (PTI) 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.

According to Parameswaran, agents were reducing turnaround times in vehicle-loan sales and credit underwriting, with processes that earlier took hours or days being reduced to minutes.

He said enterprises were likely to initially deploy AI agents for lower-risk tasks before gradually allowing them to handle more consequential decisions as trust, security and contextual understanding improve.

“This will be the normal maturity cycle, where the easier tasks come first, and what I mean by easier is where the impact of an error is not that high.” The executives also said India’s technology workforce would need to reskill as AI changes the nature of software and enterprise technology jobs.

Bhattacharya said repetitive work would increasingly be handled by AI, allowing employees to focus on more specialised and higher-value roles.

She cited roles such as AI ethicists, prompt engineers and forward-deployed engineers as examples of newer jobs emerging around AI.

Parameswaran said the traditional developer role could change as AI improves productivity, while demand grows for other specialised capabilities.

“The traditional role of the developer changes from a scale perspective. Earlier, if I had 20 developers doing something, I’d probably have two developers doing it in a tenth of the time. That traditional role changes, but a number of these other roles get created,” he opined.

Kumar, meanwhile, said India’s strong developer community could put the country among the leading markets for agentic innovation by 2030.

“If I had to say, looking around the world, where are the countries where you see the top cutting-edge innovation in the agentic enterprise, I absolutely believe India is going to be at the top of the list,” he said.

The executives were speaking on the sidelines of Dreamforce 2026 organised by Salesforce in San Francisco from September 15-17. PTI RSN HVA