India is software giant Salesforce’s second largest employee base outside the US and it continues to grow fast, a senior company executive said, coming at a time when technology companies are looking to expand their global capability centres (GCCs) in India to onboard skilled tech talent.
Rightly so, since 2020, when Arundhati Bhattacharya took over as the new chairperson and the CEO for Salesforce India, the company’s headcount went up from 2,200 to around 9,000 as of June, spread across Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune and Jaipur. Globally, Salesforce has over 79,000 employees in 2023.
Speaking at Salesforce flagship event Dreamforce 2023 APAC edition in San Francisco, Amy Weaver, chief financial officer said, “India is the biggest country of our employees outside the US and it is growing fast. We have more trailblazers and the biggest ecosystem in India than any other country outside the United States.”
Employees based out of India have also played a key role in terms of working with the global support teams, and engineering and product development teams.
“There is a lot of work that we do for the global support from here, not only in the area of support, but also the engineering, product development, and R&D. Plus, there are a number of other teams like the GA teams, finance teams, etc., working out of India. Our salespeople are also around roughly 700 to 800,” Bhattacharya had said in June.
As the company continues to work on its next big area of innovation which is artificial intelligence, India will see more demand for domestic talent given that nearly 16 percent of the world's AI talent pool is in this country, according to Nasscom’s State of Data Science and AI Skills report.
Bhattacharya had also mentioned that India as a market has been seeing strong double-digit growth in the higher teens in terms of business.
Bullish on AI opportunity
Just like its technology peers, Salesforce sees its next phase of growth coming from artificial intelligence (AI), from its core offering Einstein 1 platform.
The company has also launched a $500 million fund to invest in startups and developers building applications over Einstein 1 platform, said Co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff.
Benioff gave a full-year revenue guidance of $34.8 billion in FY24.
He said, “We have been in this AI revolution for over a decade now, working on our predictive technology called Einstein."
Benioff said that this platform is already number one and the most used AI platform globally.
“Generative AI has taken over the world in the past nine months, now we are heading towards the next phase, Artificial General Intelligence. There is no question that this AI opportunity is going to change everything and anything,” he added.
He called what's happening in AI "incredible", but added that ultimately the technology will impact who we are and how we operate, bringing people back to their core values.
Einstein 1 platform is an integrated, low code no code and open solution. The company plans to release over 25 new features by the fourth quarter of 2024 on the platform.
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