Arundhati Bhattacharya: 'Salesforce is already in the process of adding a generative AI layer, for every single cloud service that we have'

She also points to cybersecurity. “It's very important to exchange, and share, what are the kinds of threats that are emanating. How do you actually take care of those threats? Accordingly, there are many areas in technology and digital technology, specifically, where I think both the US and India can benefit a lot by collaboration.”

While Salesforce is largely a software firm that specializes in business software, does she see the growing wave of AI shaping her firm?

“Salesforce is already in the process of adding a generative AI layer, for every single cloud service that we have. Now, our expertise and core strength lies in creating customer experiences, so we differentiate ourselves by creating experiences customers will want to come back to,” she says. “How do you create that distinctive experience? Leverage the data that you have about the customer, create the golden record of the client so as to understand their needs and make every interaction with them memorable. Data can be obtained from many, many sources. What generative AI does, as opposed to just AI, is take data from all kinds of unstructured sources, because it can read and understand and make sense of it.”

Is there trepidation around whether AI could replace some jobs altogether or fall into the wrong hands?

“I can tell you that this large language model that is currently there has an ability to learn. Now, if you ask me, how does it learn? I haven't got a proper answer from anybody. We ourselves don't seem to know exactly how it learns. But as this learning deepens, there is a fear that that ability to learn may exceed our ability to create and learn. Okay, so it will learn to an extent that it begins to create. Right now the versions don’t quite use what is called Emotional Intelligence. EQ is not there but maybe it will be learned in later versions?” she says. “We don't know yet... AI applications are not sentient and that is the difference with humans.”

So what happens if AI-driven programs do become sentient and envelop EQ?

“We don't know. So those answers are at this point of time unknown. But what is scaring people a little is the speed at which it is improving. It's very, very fast, the evolution is very fast. So from GPT 1, to two to three to four, now, four is already in place, and four can create images and stuff like that. So we don't know by the time it becomes GPT 10, what it's going to be like.”

She goes on to add that the fear of the unknown shouldn’t halt development.  “Even when people discovered the atom bomb and then the hydrogen bomb, it could be used for good purposes and bad purposes, but you cannot stop change. There will be bad actors. How we protect against them is what we need to determine.”

She sees it in the context of the broader good: “Generative AI will be there to help us, to be a co-pilot or an assistant. Look at the state hospitals, absolutely overrun with patients. Now, again, we need human beings to note down the symptoms, dig into the symptoms to understand the causes. If generative AI was used instead, imagine how much time we can save.”

She goes on. “Say, every state hospital is given stocks of anti-venom because India has snakes, and snakebites happen. But in certain places, there are more snake bites than in other places. Now, there you may be running short of the anti-venom in some places whereas in places where snake bites are rare, the drug may actually be going out of date. So, we can end up being short on resources at one place and excess in others, because they aren’t properly allocated, which can be fixed if we use generative AI,” she says. “Similarly, some disease might be coming up in one place, and one can get an understanding of it much before it actually becomes too big to control.”

Salesforce in India had made overtures to beef up hiring. Where is that now?

Bhattacharya says that “in the last six months, we added some in the support area but not in the other areas. The pace at which we were hiring has reduced but I won’t say that we have stopped altogether here, and we do expect that pace to pick up again in the next couple of years.”

Does Bhattacharya have a take on the raging debate on WFH and the four-day work week?

“My own take is that it has to be very flexible. It's very important for people to get together, in order to be really productive but that doesn't mean that there won’t be times when you have to prioritize home over office,” she says.

At SBI, she in fact, did a small survey. "In India, strangely, there are two other periods when women tend to fall off the workforce. One is when the child is between classes 9 to 12 and needs to be looked after, managed and chauffeured around. Traditionally it is the mothers’ job.  The other time is when parents or parents-in-law fall sick. But if you are able to be flexible during that time, allow them to work from home for that particular period, you would be saving many careers.

“Our policies are role-dependent. For example, our developers need a big setup. They need double monitors. Now, I can't have a setup for them in the office as well as at home. So, what we expect of them is that they come to office when they are brainstorming on the product itself, but the basic coding and the developing work, they do at home. So, it depends from segment to segment but they have to be at work for a few days a week.”

She adds that for India, specifically, being flexible is intrinsic to leveraging talent nationwide. “We have very good talent in tier-2, tier-3 cities. I don't really need the Lucknow sales guys to come and sit in Mumbai, do I? I can ask them to work from home there because we don't have an office there. Yes, they will come in every once in a while, when we are having reviews, but more or less, they can continue to work from home. It would be similar for other industrial hubs such as Ludhiana and Tirupur.”

Her idea is to be intelligently flexible, and not thrust a one-size-fits-all model. “Having said that, I still feel that when you are in office, there is collaborative sharing, so much learning. In these virtual calls, you log in at a particular time and log out at a particular time. Gone are the conversations between the end of a meeting and the beginning of the next. As you're collecting up your papers and everything and moving out, there is side talk. And often the insights come out in the side talk rather than the main discussion,” she says.

To step back to the macroenvironment in the country’s economic landscape, are there any speed bumps that she sees along the way? “I have said it a number of times like a broken record…our ease of doing business can still improve a lot. We have done a lot, and scrapped a lot of old laws but lots more can be done.”

When the former banker and technocrat isn’t at work, what is she doing?

Recently, it’s been Danish serials, books with two examples being Exprovement which is on driving efficiencies from unrelated industries and Whole Numbers and Half Truths about how numbers can be misinterpreted to show almost anything.  And, of course, travel.

Bhattacharya says she was in Rome and Florence recently for a week and saw every art gallery that she possibly could. “You cannot leave this planet before you see Florence and the surfeit of sculptures and Michelangelo’s works there (especially David).”

If history repeats itself, then art and culture clearly serve as archives for the future - that is the lesson.