India’s success will have a direct impact on Salesforce’s success: Vala Afshar

As enterprises globally move beyond AI pilots and prototypes toward large-scale deployment, India is emerging as one of the most important battlegrounds for enterprise AI adoption. From banks and airlines to retailers and startups, companies are increasingly using AI agents to automate customer service, sales operations, commerce and internal workflows at scale.

For Salesforce, India has emerged as a critical market in the company’s global growth and technology strategy. The company now sees the country not only as a major talent and engineering hub, but also as one of its fastest-growing enterprise markets, driven by rapid digital adoption, a large startup ecosystem and expanding enterprise technology spending. Vala Afshar, Chief Digital Evangelist at Salesforce, spoke to Business Today about India’s growing importance in Salesforce’s strategy, changing enterprise technology spending patterns, the rise of automation across functions such as customer service and commerce, and how companies are rethinking business operations and workforce structures. Edited excerpts:

BT: India is seeing rapid enterprise technology adoption. What opportunities are emerging from the Indian market and how important is India for Salesforce’s overall strategy?

VA: India’s success is going to have a direct impact on Salesforce’s success. This is our largest hub outside the US and one of the fastest-growing markets for us globally. We launched Salesforce India in 2001 and have grown from around 2,000 employees to nearly 17,000.

The commitment to India will continue because the talent pool and the pace of digital adoption here are extraordinary. India already has two million Salesforce developers and nearly three million learners using Trailhead, our online learning platform. According to IDC, the Salesforce ecosystem alone is expected to contribute nearly $89 billion in new business revenues in India by 2028.

India’s startup ecosystem is also becoming increasingly important. The country now has 131 unicorns and we continue to actively invest in Indian startups through Salesforce Ventures. A large number of the startups we are closely engaging with today are AI-focused companies.

BT: What kind of enterprise use cases are seeing the strongest adoption right now?

VA: Customer service and support are leading adoption globally because service organisations already operate with structured workflows, governance models and service-level agreements. Anything that is repetitive, deterministic and process-driven becomes a strong candidate for automation. If I had to estimate, nearly 60% of current enterprise agent adoption is happening in service operations.

Sales is probably the second-largest area of adoption, both internally—for coaching—and externally—for forecasting and customer engagement. Marketing and commerce are accelerating rapidly as well.

In commerce, the scale of change is significant. During November and December 2025 alone, Salesforce Commerce Cloud processed nearly $1.3 trillion in global commerce transactions. Out of that, around $262 billion involved agent-driven recommendations or automated customer engagement.

Agents are increasingly personalising customer experiences based on purchase history, preferences and browsing patterns.

BT: Enterprises are investing heavily in AI and automation. What kind of returns are companies expecting from these investments?

VA: The biggest return is speed and operational efficiency. Businesses are still measuring success through traditional KPIs such as marketing conversion, sales productivity, customer service resolution times and operational efficiency. What has changed dramatically is the speed at which those outcomes can now be achieved.

For example, before an important customer meeting, I can ask an agent to instantly generate a customer profile, financial performance insights, competitive positioning, previous meeting history and recommendations on how to position Salesforce products. Earlier, gathering that information could take days or weeks. Now it happens in real time.

At Salesforce, more than 60,000 employees actively use agents daily. Instead of manually searching through dashboards and reports, employees are increasingly interacting with systems that synthesise information and generate insights instantly.

BT: What are the biggest organisational changes enterprises are underestimating while adopting AI?

VA: AI transformation is not only a technology shift. It is fundamentally an organisational and cultural transformation.

Companies need to redesign workflows, reskill employees, redeploy talent, and recalibrate performance metrics. At Salesforce, we redeployed nearly 3,000 employees into sales functions after automating repetitive tasks through AI systems.

A lot of CEOs are no longer asking technology questions. They are asking whether their culture is capable of adapting quickly enough to the speed of change.

BT: How are SaaS business models changing with the rise of AI?

VA: Traditional licensing models are evolving rapidly. Companies are experimenting with hybrid pricing structures combining subscription-based pricing, consumption models, and impact-based pricing.

Customers still want predictable enterprise licensing, but they are also trying to understand how automation and token usage will scale within their organisations. More broadly, businesses are moving from software platforms towards what we describe as digital labour platforms. Enterprises are increasingly viewing intelligent systems as operational contributors rather than just productivity tools.

BT: There is increasing competition in enterprise AI. How is Salesforce positioning itself in this market?

VA: Successful companies stay intensely focused on customers rather than competitors. At the end of the day, you have to deliver measurable outcomes for customers.

At Salesforce, we believe customer experience starts with employee experience. Happy employees create better customer experiences. That philosophy remains central to how we operate.

Interestingly, many companies people describe as competitors, including Microsoft, Google and Amazon, are also Salesforce customers and strategic partners. We collaborate extensively with them, especially in areas such as cloud infrastructure and local data residency requirements.

BT: What is the biggest barrier to enterprise AI adoption in India?

VA: Culture is probably the biggest challenge. Organisations need to create safe environments for experimentation because adopting new technologies requires constant learning and iteration.

Companies that punish failure will struggle to keep pace with businesses that encourage experimentation and rapid deployment. We are already beyond the stage of pilots and presentations. Technology now has to move into production environments and deliver measurable business impact.

India, however, is uniquely positioned because of the scale of engineering talent, startup activity, digital infrastructure and entrepreneurial energy present in the market today.

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