BFSI, Retail and Manufacturing to Drive Salesforce Growth in India: Arundhati Bhattacharya

BFSI, retail and manufacturing to drive the US-based IT firm Salesforce's growth in India over the next three years, a top executive of the company said.

"The three-year agenda remains more or less the same. We still see a lot of growth coming out of the BFSI sector and retail sector. We see plenty of growth in manufacturing, travel, tourism, hotels and healthcare. So many of these sectors are showing pretty steady and good growth," Salesforce South Asia CEO Arundhati Bhattacharya told PTI.

"Even smaller sectors, like real estate and education are showing pretty good growth. So in India, I would say that the growth remains pretty consistent in the areas that we have been in, and we continue to see momentum over there. With the newer kinds of technologies that are coming in, there is a lot of openness as to how it should be developed, or how it should be absorbed," she said.

The global customer relationship management (CRM) technology solutions giant Salesforce expects its revenues to cross USD 41 billion in FY26 at the global level.

Salesforce started operations in India in 2005 with its first centre of excellence in Hyderabad. Now the company is spread to six locations in India with an annual revenue of USD 1 billion with a workforce of over 13,000. India is the second biggest market for the company after the US.

Bhattacharya smashed the glass ceiling in 2013 when she became the first woman to lead the State Bank of India (SBI) in the bank's over 200-year history. She retired from SBI in 2017 and went on to reinvent herself with a brand new career innings at the helm of cloud-based service provider Salesforce India in 2020 as Chairperson and CEO.

Since then, under her leadership, Salesforce India operation has seen multi-fold jump both in terms of revenue and headcount.

Speaking about AI adoption by Indian banks, Bhattacharya said every single company in its board conversations earlier used to talk digitization but now is talking adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

"Where they will make the most use of it in order to get the best returns is probably the concern. It's not a question of using it. I think most boards are convinced that they need to use it. It's a question as to where and how do you put transactions on it? Do you put things like grievance portals on it? "Where exactly do you put it in order to get the best value out of it? I think those conversations are still on. Not every company is convinced about everything, but the fact that they will be bringing it sooner than later," she said.

Some pilot stages are going on with some of the banks, she added.

Meanwhile, Salesforce has introduced Agentforce IT Service, an agent-first, conversational-first IT support product suite to help organizations save their time.

This scalable, secure, and trusted offering lightens the load of IT teams by delivering instant, conversational resolutions for employees, directly where they work.

For employees, this means IT support is no longer a portal where you have to file a ticket and wait, but instant, personalized, and proactive help wherever they work.

For IT teams, this shift lowers IT costs, delivers AI assistance in the flow of work, and offers freedom to focus on strategic initiatives that deliver business growth, Salesforce said in a statement.

IT teams and employees benefit from Agentforce IT Service being built on the deeply unified Salesforce platform because it breaks down enterprise data silos to enable faster, AI-driven auto-resolutions and seamless, cross-departmental workflows for all users.

Furthermore, Agentforce IT Service benefits from best practices inherited from Service Cloud, eliminating costly integrations and data fragmentation to ensure a single source of truth that results in accurate, grounded resolutions that maximizes staff efficiency and employee satisfaction, it said.