Artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping the technology landscape, triggering both excitement and anxiety across markets. President and CEO, Salesforce South Asia, Arundhati Bhattacharya, speaks with Urvi Malvania on the debate around AI’s impact on SaaS, the need for continuous reskilling, and how Salesforce is approaching governance, oversight and the shift towards agentic AI. Excerpts:
Tech disruptions are common, yet new AI tools are triggering unusual market anxiety. What’s driving this, and how should SaaS players view it?
Some of it is an overreaction and with time, these things will settle down. These reactions are more triggered by the narrative but not so much in reality. I don’t believe in the script that is going around of SaaS being totally disrupted. This reaction is because it is a fact that what these models are doing is very disruptive.
We must understand that it is in lab conditions. In actual production conditions, there are a lot many more factors that need to be considered and only then the whole thing starts working. Implementing it is not as simple because the context is very much required.
At the end of the day, whatever you use AI for, it must have a context and the SaaS players have the context.
You saw major disruptions in banking when you wore the hat of a banker. Are there lessons from that experience that apply to leading Salesforce today?
One lesson obviously is that changes will happen, evolution will happen, and there is no way that you should not be part of it. You need to get into the water and swim, come what may. Staying away is not an answer.
Whether it was innovation and disruption in financial services at that or now in technology, you need to be very open. You need to be able to accept it without fearing it.
You mentioned that AI could create more jobs over time, but that is the long run. What message would you give tech professionals, and students about to join the tech workforce right now?
We are trying to ensure that AI enables people and that most of these workflows have a human in the loop. Now for doing that, to students who are still in colleges, we would tell them, they need to be able to use the AI tools and increase their AI fluency. Simultaneously they also must look at creative ideas to use these tools.
People who are working in the tech sector, they need to constantly look at how they’re reskilling themselves. You must stay on top of the tools that are coming out on a regular basis.
There is no advice beyond that. At end of the day, you must be familiar with the world that is unfolding around you.
What is Salesforce doing to facilitate AI fluency and readiness?
We have systematic modules created for us to also be able to learn not only ourselves but group learning.
Plus, we have the permission to experiment with newer tools that come up like Gemini, Claude Code, OpenAI (tools) on our various applications.
Every organisation has got to be a learning organisation. If you are not a learning organisation, then you are putting yourself at risk.
You have highlighted human oversight, ethical AI use, governance and compliance as core priorities. Where does Salesforce stand now, and have related products reached the market?
We have several agents that are currently in the market. We are helping organisations become agentic enterprises.
In all of these we have a trust layer that ensures that the output is free of bias, hallucinations or toxicity. We test for these things at the trust layer itself.
And that trust layer is something that we have built ourselves and we continuously monitor it.
How has Salesforce’s strategy evolved amid recent technological advancements?
We are trying to infuse each of our services with agentic AI across sales, service, marketing and analytics. The way of working is changing because we are using these newer innovations to empower us. Our own internal usage of Slackbots has gone up hugely. Since it sit on top of Slack, which we use internally, we use it effectively for multiple things.