India’s digital maturity positions it better than any other country to leverage the third wave of artificial intelligence (AI) for serving millions of underserved citizens across education, healthcare, and customer service sectors, with AI-enabled workforces becoming “limitless” in their capability to serve customers, Salesforce India CEO and chairperson Arundhati Bhattacharya said on Thursday.
“There are no countries in the world that have the kind of public digital infrastructure that India has. This positions us uniquely to leverage the third wave of AI, which is the agentic layer, in the areas of education, healthcare, and customer service,” Bhattacharya said, while addressing media at the launch of Salesforce AI Pitchfield, in Bengaluru on Thursday .
Artificial intelligence has evolved through three distinct waves — from basic predictive analytics to generative AI, and now to the agentic layer, that incorporates advanced reasoning capabilities. This latest evolution enables AI systems to not only generate content and engage in conversations but also execute complex automated actions, marking a significant advancement in enterprise technology.
India’s position in the AI landscape is further strengthened by having the world’s third-largest startup ecosystem and the second-largest community of Salesforce platform innovators, globally, after the United States, Bhattacharya said. She noted that the government’s Startup India initiative has created an environment that actively promotes innovation, enabling companies to effectively harness AI capabilities.
The company has been running multiple pilot programs with large enterprises since launching its AI capabilities in September last year, with adoption trends showing “phenomenal” progress, she added.
While highlighting strong adoption trends, Bhattacharya addressed the growing focus on data security in enterprise AI implementations. “With ChatGPT, there is a lot of talk on whether data is going out to train the model. So there are a lot of questions that are being asked by our customers, which we believe we are answering to their satisfaction,” she added.
Successful AI agent deployment, she noted, requires careful consideration of prerequisites. “We have to understand the pain points, identify the use cases. Second is we have to get the data sources in order – you can’t just apply it anywhere to a source which is incorrect or not your own. The third thing is security, are they compliant, are they secure.”
