Salesforce India Intends To Grow Fast In The Country: Arundhati Bhattacharya

In an exclusive interaction, Arundhati Bhattacharya, Chairperson and Chief Executive Officer for Salesforce (India), speaks with BW Businessworld on the current tough market conditions, market opportunity in India and newly launched Einstein GPT. Excerpts:  

Most market reports indicate slow IT spending in 2023 across India. How do you see this affecting Salesforce India? 

2023 is going to be a challenging year for many nations, but India has a unique opportunity. With a 1.4 billion population, India will remain a consumption driven economy. Digital transformation is one of the key drivers delivering sustained economic growth.

Salesforce’s growth in India has been fuelled by businesses accelerating the adoption of cloud technologies and partnering with us as their trusted digital advisor. Leading companies, like Air India, HDFC Ltd., Tata CliQ, and Mahindra Ltd. among many others, use our technologies to connect with their customers and service them better. In India, we have a flourishing Salesforce ecosystem with an established network of partners, over 2 million Salesforce developers and more Trailhead users than any market outside the United States. We have seen that the growth trajectory in India is still intact and we intend to grow fast in the country.

Do you feel that the current market conditions favour smaller players in the space? 

When Salesforce was founded in 1999, the idea was how to make CRM simple and it was always SMB first. Today, the majority of our customers are SMBs, which have less than 100 employees. Hence, this is not new for us and our services and products can be leveraged by all businesses, small or large enterprises.

SMB businesses are born digital and are actively looking to adopt technology that strengthens their strategy and a number of them have started to look at using automation and cloud solutions. According to a study by the global market intelligence firm International Data Corporation (IDC) predicting the technology and business trends among SMBs in India, one-third of businesses will increase investments in automation and digital tools by 2026 to make up for the shortage of workers, reduce manual processes and human error, and boost productivity.

Is the scenario in India brighter than outside the country (business-wise) in 2023?

The last year has been a roller-coaster ride in the tech industry. The economic downturn had the industry strategising to be able to adapt. But I have always believed after every challenge you will come out stronger and I am confident of the growth trajectory we’ve had in India and we’ll continue to deliver as a nation.

When I joined Salesforce, we were about 1,500 and today we have over 9,000 employees in India, across offices in Bengaluru, Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Pune, and Jaipur. The expansion of the CoE was a significant step for us that reinforces our commitment to India as a key market. The product teams at Hyderabad CoE will continue to develop several Cloud-first industry solutions for enterprises of all sizes, for India and the rest of the world. The country’s fast-growing economy, digital connectivity, and highly skilled workforce provide a unique opportunity for us to play an important role in supporting the global acceleration of digital transformation and innovation.

How is Einstein GPT helpful for Indian businesses/companies?

Einstein GPT will infuse Salesforce’s proprietary AI models with generative AI technology from an ecosystem of partners and real-time data from the Salesforce Data Cloud, which ingests, harmonises, and unifies all of a company’s customer data. With Einstein GPT, customers can then connect that data to OpenAI’s advanced AI models out of the box, or choose their own external model and use natural-language prompts directly within their Salesforce CRM to generate content that continuously adapts to changing customer information and needs in real time.
 
For example, Einstein GPT can generate personalised emails for salespeople to send to customers, generate specific responses for customer service professionals to more quickly answer customer questions, generate targeted content for marketers to increase campaign response rates, and auto-generate code for developers.

BFSI sector globally is bound to cut IT spends in 2023. What is the trend like in the Indian context right now?

The BFSI industry plays a predominant role in the global economy. The sector is constantly evolving and it is imperative for organisations to adopt new technologies in order to improve efficiency, security and customer experience, especially when facing headwinds. Migration to the cloud can enable companies in the BFSI sector to reduce costs and improve scalability and cloud-based platforms like Salesforce provide them with what they need to adapt to changing market conditions. Additionally, as the BFSI industry is under constant pressure to deliver new products and services to customers quickly, low-code and no-code platforms can provide a solution to this challenge. These platforms will grow in popularity among BFSI companies as they enable faster development and deployment of applications without the need for extensive coding knowledge.

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