Indian companies are moving from artificial intelligence experiments to production deployments, Salesforce President and Chief Executive Officer, South Asia, Arundhati Bhattacharya, said, as the country enters a wider phase of enterprise AI adoption.
Bhattacharya said India offered significant “white space” for growth in digital and agentic AI and that Salesforce would continue to invest in physical infrastructure, talent development and recruitment in the country.
“So I would say that yes, they (Indian companies) are moving towards putting things in production,” Bhattacharya said in an interview to PTI when asked whether Indian firms were moving towards large-scale deployment after experimenting with generative AI and AI agents.
She said a new Salesforce tower in Bengaluru was expected to come on stream next year as part of the company’s investments in India.
“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 in San Francisco.
Bhattacharya said Salesforce would combine internal innovation with acquisitions to add new capabilities for customers. She cited the company’s 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 President and Chief Platform and Engineering Officer Rohan Kumar said the company’s vision for the “agentic enterprise” rested on a four-layer architecture comprising Data 360, Customer 360, Agentforce and AIforce.
Kumar said the growing use of autonomous agents would require enterprises to strengthen 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.
IT leaders would increasingly be responsible for managing the number, activity and cost of agents, while security teams would need to establish agent identities and monitor their actions, Kumar said.
“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 said.
Arun Parameswaran, Executive Vice-President 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 once took hours or days being reduced to minutes.
He said enterprises were likely to deploy AI agents first for lower-risk tasks before allowing them to handle more consequential decisions as trust, security and contextual understanding improved.
“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,” he said.
The executives also said India’s technology workforce would need to reskill as AI changed the nature of software and enterprise technology jobs.
Bhattacharya said AI would increasingly handle repetitive work, allowing employees to focus on more specialised and higher-value roles.
She cited AI ethicists, prompt engineers and forward-deployed engineers as examples of newer roles emerging around artificial intelligence.
Parameswaran said the traditional developer role could change as AI improved productivity, while demand grew 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 said.
Kumar 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 to 17.
