Salesforce grew in the “higher teens” in India and will see even higher growth over the next few years, chairperson and CEO Arundhati Bhattacharya said on June 27, as global markets struggle in a tough business climate.
“We don't break out the numbers from APAC, but we have seen pretty good growth (in India). So, we are growing in the double digits and in the higher teens…We continue to see the potential for such growth going forward for the next few years,” Bhattacharya said in a media interaction on the sidelines of the Salesforce “World Tour Essentials India” in Mumbai.
Salesforce India's workforce expanded from 2,200, when she joined in 2020, to around 9,000 spread across Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune and Jaipur.
“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,” she said.
The drivers of the company’s growth in India include a focus on creating a digital customer experience.
Betting big on Generative AI
Bhattacharya said the biggest area of innovation for the company was the generative AI space. “So we are coming up with some tools that will allow us to open real-time generative experience across all of our products. So that's the way we are going at this point of time,” she said
Salesforce launched Einstein GPT, a generative AI tool focussed on customer relationship management, in March. The company also introduced SlackGPT for its workplace communication app Slack.
India is still some distance away when it comes to large-scale generative AI adoption, especially in the public sector and the government, there are still a lot of legacy systems that are on prem (on-premise), she said.
On-premise cloud infrastructure or systems mean a private cloud system owned and controlled by a company on its campus.
AI uses a huge amount of data and the capacity for crunching data has to be really large. “It's difficult to do that on on-prem systems because on-prem systems are costly and need to have several sets of the same equipment, in order to have the business continuity or disaster recovery,” she said.
“Unless and until we see more adoption of the cloud itself, it will be very difficult for India Inc to adopt the AI engine... Generative AI is even bigger where the datasets are concerned.”
New SME offering
Salesforce, a leading player in Customer Relationship Management (CRM), announced the launch of Salesforce 'Starter' for micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in India.
Starter includes sales, service and email outreach tools in one suite, which will help businesses to improve customer experiences, reduce costs and drive revenue, it said.
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