India presents an exciting opportunity, world moving into an Indian era: Salesforce chairman

Customer relationship management-focused company Salesforce's Chairman and Chief Executive Marc Benioff said that the world is moving into an "Indian era".

Speaking to reporters on the sidelines of the annual 'Dreamforce' event, Benioff said the opportunities in India are "exciting" and the company has invested in the country aggressively.

"You can see that the world is moving into the Indian era. There is no question that we are going to move into an incredible moment in India," he said.

The global company, which is aiming to close FY25 with a revenue of $38 billion, has over 11,000 employees in the country. A bulk of the employee base serves the global client base; the increasing adoption of digital technologies has made its India business grow as well.

"We do all kinds of things in India including engineering and support but also we go to market in India," Benioff said, adding that it serves large customers like the auto major Bajaj group.

He said the company has a "phenomenal leader" in Arundhati Bhattacharya, the former SBI chairman, who is helped by a managerial team.

"Arundhati is an incredible leader. She came out of the banking world ... We are very, very fortunate to have her leading our operations," he said.

The company, however, did not share any specific targets on the business from India or the growth in the domestic business and manpower.

The company launched its 'Agentforce' offering at the annual event, promising an autonomous AI solution to customers, akin to driverless cars.

The company said co-pilots and chatbots are "outdated", which led it to launch the suite that will help employees across functions such as service, sales, marketing, and commerce, according to an official statement.

The statement said the widely used co-pilots and chatbots are now outdated because they rely on human requests and struggle with complex or multi-step tasks.

The newly launched offering has the sophistication of a self-driving car, retrieves the right data on demand, builds action plans for any task, and executes them without requiring human intervention, the statement said.

Acknowledging that AI may lead to job losses in the future, Benioff said all of it depends on how a company tackles it and cited a customer example where the employees have been repurposed into sales, which has delivered higher growth.