Salesforce sees faster AI adoption among Indian enterprises

“Compared to 12 months back, we are seeing much more acceleration,” she said, attributing the shift to companies recognising that experimentation alone would not deliver the benefits they were looking for. Bhattacharya spoke to FE on the side lines of Salesforces’ annual three-day event Dreamforce.

Security, compliance and auditability are emerging as important factors in this transition, she said. Enterprises are more comfortable working with Salesforce because of the observability and auditability it provides around AI deployments, particularly as regulators increasingly seek to understand how decisions are made and whether the appropriate processes were followed.

She said Salesforce’s approach is also designed to give customers flexibility over the AI models they use. The company is not insisting that customers adopt its own models and can work with models that enterprises already have or use from other providers.

Referring to the four pillars outlined by Salesforce chair Marc Benioff during his keynote address at Dreamforce — AI Force, Agent Force, Data Cloud and Customer 360 — she said Salesforce can work with customers at any of these layers, irrespective of the model they use.

“We can come in at any of those points, any of those layers and ensure that that layer works in perfect consonance with whatever you have in order to give you the best results,” she said.

This openness, combined with the company’s emphasis on security and trust, is becoming increasingly relevant as enterprises move AI from pilots into production, she said.

At the same time, Salesforce views AI as a means of surfacing latent demand rather than simply reducing employee numbers. A Salesforce market research team in India provides an example. The five-member team could previously cover only enterprise accounts in India. With AI, it now covers all accounts, including smaller companies, as well as accounts in ASEAN.

“That has resulted in us uncovering more sales opportunities than we knew we had,” she said. Salesforce subsequently added more salespeople, illustrating how AI-driven productivity can expand the scope of existing teams and create additional business opportunities.

On the question of increasing automation and autonomy, she said enterprises remain cautious. “At this point of time, there is very little that is totally autonomous,” she said, adding that there is a human in the loop at all stages. Companies, she said, will determine how far they move towards autonomy based on their own risk appetite.

Traditional large enterprises, in particular, are more careful because they have greater customer trust at stake, she said. Digital-native companies may have a different risk profile, while established enterprises cannot afford to lose customer trust built over decades.

(The writer was in San Francisco at the invitation of Salesforce)