BFSI, retail and manufacturing to drive Salesforce growth in India: CEO Arundhati Bhattacharya
“The three-year agenda remains more or less the same. We still see a lot of growth coming from the BFSI sector and the retail sector. We see a lot of growth in manufacturing, travel, tourism, hotels and healthcare. Most of these sectors are quite stable and showing good growth,” Salesforce South Asia CEO Arundhati Bhattacharya told PTI.
“Even smaller sectors like real estate and education are showing pretty good growth. So I would say in India, growth in the areas we are in has remained pretty consistent and we continue to see momentum there. There is a lot of clarity around the new types of technologies that are emerging and how they need to be developed or how they need to be assimilated,” he said.
Global customer relationship management (CRM) technology solutions giant Salesforce expects its revenues to exceed $41 billion globally in FY26.
Salesforce started its operations in India in 2005 with its first center of excellence in Hyderabad. The company currently operates across six locations in India, with annual revenues of $1 billion and a workforce of over 13,000. India is the company’s second largest market after the United States.
In 2013, Bhattacharya broke the glass ceiling by becoming the first woman to lead the State Bank of India (SBI) in the bank’s more than 200-year history. He retired from SBI in 2017 and continued to reinvent himself with a brand new career leap in 2020 as President and CEO at the helm of cloud-based service provider Salesforce India. Since then, under his leadership, the Salesforce India operation has grown manifold in terms of both revenue and headcount. Talking about the adoption of artificial intelligence by Indian banks, Bhattacharya said that every company had previously talked about digitalization in board discussions but now they are talking about the adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
“The concern is probably where they will use it the most to get the best return. It’s not about using it. I think most boards are convinced they need to use it. It’s a question of where and how do you put transactions? Do you put things like complaint portals on it?”
“Where exactly are you going to put it to get the best value out of it? I think those conversations are still ongoing. Not every company is convinced on everything, but they’re buying into the fact that they’re going to bring it in as soon as possible,” he said.
He added that some pilot phases are ongoing in some banks.
Meanwhile, Salesforce introduced Agentforce IT Service, an agent-first, conversation-first IT support product suite to help organizations save time.
This scalable, secure and reliable offering eases the burden on IT teams by providing instant, conversational solutions to employees right where they work.
For employees, this means IT support is no longer a portal where you have to report and wait, but immediate, personalized and proactive assistance no matter where they work.
For IT teams, this shift reduces IT costs, provides AI support in workflow, and offers the freedom to focus on strategic initiatives that drive business growth, Salesforce said in a statement.
IT teams and employees benefit from Agentforce IT Service, built on the deeply unified Salesforce platform, because it breaks down enterprise data silos, enabling faster, AI-driven automatic resolutions and seamless, cross-departmental workflows for all users.
Additionally, Agentforce IT Service leverages best practices inherited from the Service Cloud, eliminating costly integrations and data fragmentation to provide a single source of truth that results in accurate, grounded solutions that maximize staff productivity and employee satisfaction.
