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The entry of agentic AI will not take away jobs of software developers but change the nature of their work, said Arun Kumar Parameswaran, EVP & Managing Director – Sales & Distribution, Salesforce – South Asia.
Following the release of a company report on the state of IT, Kumar spoke at length about AI’s influence on jobs and Salesforce’s plans in India. Excerpts:
Your report mentions 100 per cent of the teams you spoke to use or intend to use AI for coding completely. Does that mean the jobs of coders are kaput?
Jobs of coders are not kaput, what they do is kaput. There is no meaning to setting and writing code that otherwise a tool can write for you. You would rather than focus on figuring out how to make that code do something interesting. You can spend more time on figuring out the architecture of how to scale that code, what are the corner cases that you can test against for which you generally do not have time. So, I do not think the job of the software developer is gone. I am looking at all these students these days. They are not writing a single line of code, they are literally cutting and pasting from chatGPT and various tools, but they are spending more time thinking about how the code will interact with the customer and how to delight the customer and things like that which earlier they did not have the time for.
Within Salesforce, you laid off around 1,000 employees globally. Are you shifting around your employees to different departments or are they being replaced by AI?
Anytime we go through any of these actions, the first thing we do is make sure that everybody has an opportunity to look at all the different options they have within the company. We are a very values-driven company and that is how we have always worked with all of our employees. But I also think that right now, you look at where the market is heading, we are seeing the kind of opportunity that we have never seen before. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Our focus continues to be on how we grow the company and monetise that opportunity in front of us with our customers.
In the IT sector, there are talks of deferred wage hikes, low hiring. Is it possible that the IT sector is hitting sort of a saturation in terms of employment opportunities?
In most technology transition, we say that this is a transition and then it goes through a phase that has a little bit of a dip and then there is a climb back. The problem with AI has been what, first it was generative AI, then it became co-pilot, then it has become agentic, tomorrow it is probably going to be robotic and before we know it, it will be AGI. We are not even letting the first wave settle before moving on to the next. I do not know honestly what will be the impact of some of these moving quicksands on the broader market. So, I think it is a wait-and-watch approach right now. Every time there is a shift, the first reaction is that we are going to lose jobs. But every one of these shifts has created more opportunities than losses. I have no doubts in my mind that AI is going to have that similar impact.
In November, you guys had talked about building the first tower in India, what’s the update there?
This is the 10th tower globally; so, it is a significant investment. It is also reads Salesforce’s importance in the Indian market as we see it from a global and corporate perspective. We will house all of our functions in there, we will have a Salesforce innovation centre, a dedicated SIC space, significant amount of space for us to bring our people together because outside of the US, there is no single country where all functions of sales force are presented the way they are in India. So I think we have a unique opportunity to do a lot more together, so this new facility will give us those opportunities.
What is your focusything for 2025 in terms of public division?
We started our foray into public sector business on February 1, 2024. It takes a while to build that business, but I can tell you that one of the advantages we have is that we are able to build something at scale and sustain it for a long period of time. We are very encouraged with our Year 1 results and the pipeline of conversations that we are having with agencies, governments, ministries and so on. So feel very bullish about it, and again this is one country which has significantly invested in public digital infrastructure, the government has to get credit in enabling the broader industry to be more technologically advanced than a lot of other countries around this region. You just need an Aadhaar card and PAN card, everything else comes from the government, an account aggregator framework will give you all of that data, even customer’s credit data, it is like the government is practically providing all the data to organisations to be able to digitise and automate.
Is there any particular State government that has shown the best response?
At this point, we cannot name a State but one of the biggest challenges that State governments have is citizen data. It sits in silos in every different department. The State government does not have a single view of that citizen in most places. That is a problem we are trying to solve with our data cloud platform. It is meant to bring a unified golden record of the customer. So if I can find a way to pivot off the citizen as the golden customer record, then I have ways of identifying all the inefficiencies in the system. Are we really intending for benefits to go to who it is meant to be versus where it is going, that is a problem statement that we are trying to solve.
Any particular sector that is responding the best to your services?
Financial services has always been the belt weather of our business globally, in India that is no different. We have had some fantastic wins. Insurance was the only one which was a little bit of a laggard, we had major wins in insurance last year. Banking, Retail Consumer Goods have been very strong for us. Another vertical is real estate. B2C aligns with what we do very well, so we are seeing a lot of interest in real estate space and healthcare as well. Hospitality has been booming. Since Covid-19, they have managed to cut down all their costs but their revenues have tripled in some cases. Room rates that used to be ₹6,000-7,000 are now ₹18,000-25,000 and what you receive is not very different from what it was. So, they are seeing a huge uptick and they are all investing heavily. Also travel, transportation, auto have been very strong for us.
Do you see the global economic slowdown affecting maybe digital spends in any way?
The rest of the world has been in a protracted slowdown for four years now. We haven’t seen anything change in India in the last four years. India has been growing at 6 per cent plus GDP. While the whole world and the Eurozone was sitting in very marginal growth, almost recession, we were growing at 7 per cent. We have very strong regulators who made sure that we don’t have some of those bad habits that other countries have gotten themselves into.
Published on April 16, 2025
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