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Salesforce India chief Arundhati Bhattacharya, on the sidelines of AI Pitchfield, told AIM that the company witnessed a growing adoption of agentic AI in India during a recent event. “India’s startup ecosystem, being the third largest in the world, is uniquely positioned to address challenges at a billion-plus scale. The progress we’re seeing with agentic AI is phenomenal, even though companies are just starting to dip their toes into it,” she remarked.
AI Pitchfield is a new startup pitch competition hosted by Salesforce Startup Community, in collaboration with Salesforce Ventures, Lightspeed India and Khaitan.
Salesforce Ventures, which has committed $1 billion globally to AI startups, sees immense potential in India as it embraces agentic AI for diverse use cases. Bhattacharya emphasised the importance of prerequisites such as clear data strategies and robust security frameworks before fully integrating AI agents. “Companies here are proactive, but they’re taking time to align their business needs with the right data sources and compliance measures,” she noted.
With pilots already underway with major Indian enterprises, Salesforce Ventures is optimistic about India’s ability to innovate in agentic AI, paving the way for future-ready solutions at scale.
Bhattacharya said that the company is running pilot programs with a significant number of companies in India using Agentforce 2.0, without delving too much into the numbers.
“It’s been very good, the kind of reactions we have got,” she said. “We are running pilots with a very large number of companies. The fact remains that it’s been very exciting.”
Introduced last year in September, Agentforce 2.0 introduces a vast library of pre-built skills that facilitate rapid customisation and deployment of AI agents. These skills cover various functionalities across Salesforce CRM, Slack, Tableau, and partner applications via AppExchange.
Reflecting on the progress since the launch, Bhattacharya said, “We are just three or four months out from there, and the progress is phenomenal. I am really enthused about it.”
However, she noted that while conversations with customers are advancing, the announcement of major deals will take time. “That will be a little more in the future. People are just now dipping their toes into it and experiencing.”
According to Bhattacharya, companies must take key preparatory steps before deploying AI agents: “First and foremost, you have to determine the use cases. Where do you really want to use them? What are the pain points you want to resolve?”
Security and compliance are key concerns for companies considering AI adoption. Bhattacharya acknowledged these apprehensions, saying, “People do want to understand what are the securities, whether they are compliant, whether they are secure. There is a lot of concern on that, where AI is concerned.”
Addressing the broader industry discussions around generative AI, she said, “If you look at ChatGPT, there has been a lot of talk about how secure it is, whether my data is going out in order to train the model. So there are a lot of questions that the companies are asking, which we need to answer to their satisfaction.”
She reiterated the importance of companies having a clear business strategy and a well-organised data strategy as prerequisites for adopting AI agents. “Once these two are there, these are prerequisites, then the agents come into post,” Bhattacharya said.
Agentic War Begins: Microsoft vs Salesforce
Microsoft chief Satya Nadella, in a recent podcast, indirectly took a dig at the company, by saying that traditional SaaS companies will collapse in the AI agent era. “I think the notion that business applications exist—that’s probably where they’ll all collapse, right, in the agent era. Because if you think about it, right, they are essentially CRUD databases with a bunch of business logic,” he said.
“Business logic is all going to these agents, and these agents are going to be multi-repo CRUD. They’re not going to discriminate between what the back end is; they’re going to update multiple databases, and all the logic will be in the AI tier,” he added.
At the Microsoft AI Tour in Bengaluru, Nadella said that “building agents should be as simple as creating a spreadsheet”. He introduced a no-code platform called Copilot Studio that allows users to create new agents based on their needs.
“Think of AI as a co-pilot for your work. It’s the UI for AI,” Nadella said, illustrating the role it will play as an interface between employees and the AI. He gave the example of an AI agent in a healthcare setting, describing a scenario where a doctor prepares for a tumour board meeting, and the AI creates the agenda, prioritises cases, and takes detailed notes during the discussion.
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