Manufacturing and real estate have emerged as fast-growing verticals for Salesforce in India, besides sectors such as retail, consumer goods and financial services, Arun Parameswaran, executive vice-president and MD, sales, South Asia, said.
The customer relationship management (CRM) solutions provider is also seeing delivery models evolve as it deploys artificial intelligence (AI)-led solutions for its clients.
“We are seeing no sectoral laggards. Even in a vertical like manufacturing, traditionally seen as brick and mortar, we are seeing customers wanting to digitise, automate and transform,” Parameswaran said.
Demand drivers among manufacturing clients include loyalty building and distributor management. This includes upgrading the distributor management systems, often more than a decade old, and solutions to build loyalty among the distributors, and wherever possible, the end consumer to effectively play in a competitive market, the official said. Demand in real estate is driven by wanting to aggressively market and personalise marketing for the end consumer, he added.
The company, which witnessed a 36% year-on-year growth in India revenue at `9,116.3 crore for the year ended January 31, currently employs over 13,000 persons in the country.
It is now leveraging agentic AI to bolster its suite of CRM solutions. The company has launched a platform called Agentforce which allows users to build, customise, and deploy autonomous AI agents to perform specific tasks.
The emergence of agentic AI has made the application of AI about taking actions, rather than just analysing the data and presenting possible outcomes and leaving the final decision on humans, Parameswaran said. As a result, customers are now identifying use cases where AI agents can take action and where over a period of time, the machine learning piece kicks in, leading to higher accuracy.
The emergence of AI within its suite of solutions is also leading to fundamental changes in the delivery models. From what was traditionally a licensing model (firms charge clients according to the number of licenses issued or the number of people using the software solution), monetisation has started moving to a consumption-based model.
“AI is going to drive a complete change to a consumption model because there’s no human involved in the loop. While today I license based on a user, when the user is a digital agent, the (monetisation) model will have to move towards the consumption – purpose rather than volume – over time,” Parameswaran said.
He likened the evolution of the delivery model to the way cloud consumption models have evolved over the past decade, though with AI, the pace of change is expected to be faster.
On the back of AI adoption by clients, Salesforce is also seeing increased demand for its data cloud business. Parameswaran said that it is among the fastest-growing solutions in India. Going forward, the firm will also drive its documentation automation solutions, which are also beginning to see growing demand as companies digitise their operations.
