From Rounding Error To Top 10 Markets of Salesforce: How Arundhati Bhattacharya Changed the Growth Story With a plan of action to further expand the business, Arundhati Bhattacharya, president and CEO, Salesforce, South Asia, shares the 2025 outlook for the tech behemoth in India

From banking to technology, this leader has revolutionized every sector she stepped into. Currently — at the helm of tech behemoth, Salesforce South Asia, a Cloud-based platform that helps businesses manage customer relationships, sales, marketing, and other key processes — the CEO spearheaded a growth of one billion dollars in revenue in the Indian market. A number which surprised the president herself! "When we crossed a billion dollars in revenues for the Indian market, it was a standout moment for me, because we aimed to achieve the milestone in four years. However, we were able to attain it within a span of three years only," said Arundhati Bhattacharya, president and CEO, Salesforce, South Asia.

When she joined Salesforce India in 2020, she was told the region was just a rounding error in the global scheme of things. Fast forward 2025, Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO, Salesforce, acknowledged Bhattacharya's role in creating a transformative impact in driving digital transformation in India.

Salesforce India achieved a revenue milestone, crossing the $1 billion mark in the fiscal year 2024, with a 36 percent growth compared to the previous year. This growth was driven by digital transformation initiatives and AI-powered solutions. Bhattacharya began her journey with Salesforce India with a team of 2,500 and today the employee base stands at 13,000-plus. It has become the second-largest outpost outside the US and a large Salesforce developer community, the second-largest globally outside the US, with over 2 million developers.

Now, leading South Asia, Bhattacharya is eyeing to create an impact on the global GDP through monetization of opportunities present in the market. The region is home to 25 percent of the world's population and hence comes with greater scope.

With a plan of action to further expand the global giant's presence in India, the CEO, shares her outlook for the tech behemoth in the region.

Investments in AI: Key Focus for 2025

Today, geopolitical uncertainties are making it difficult for companies to have a steady outlook. From economic cycles to market cycles, every phase is shrinking at a faster rate. The only constant today is artificial intelligence (AI) and its evolution. "It's very difficult therefore to predict exactly how it's going to happen. To give you an outlook for the year, I think it is now one of the biggest challenges that we have. Having said that, I believe AI is here to stay and it is our responsibility to ensure that we are creating agility and nimbleness amongst the people, customers and partners that we work with, when it comes to adoption of AI," she added.

For companies to be sustainable, AI is no more an option to explore, it's a must have. "A lot of companies want to embark on this AI journey and they don't know what the steps are. Likewise, many have embarked, but they don't know whether they're going the right way. So,I think there is a huge amount of contribution that we can make in the journeys of these companies, and it is one of the core focus areas for 2025," she said, adding that Agentic AI is another domain where the company is seeing traction.

Agentic AI is the technology that powers AI agents so they can act autonomously without human oversight. By serving as a comprehensive platform, agentic AI facilitates seamless interaction between AI agents and humans, fostering a collaborative environment where both can work together. This platform has a suite of tools and services to help AI agents learn, adapt and collaborate so they can quickly handle complex and dynamic tasks. It's the next frontier of AI known for its ability to operate independently by making decisions, adapting to dynamic situations, setting goals and reasoning.

Salesforce's agentic AI, known as Agentforce, was available in India starting from September 2024. In today's constantly evolving AI landscape, innovations like autonomous agents are emerging so quickly that businesses struggle to keep pace. Partnerships are required to provide crucial flexibility, empowering customers to develop tailored AI solutions that meet their specific needs, rather than being locked into a single model provider. Agentic AI isn't just emerging, it's already here and represents a $2 trillion market opportunity, according to a study from Salesforce.

Talking about investments in Agentic AI, she said, "There's a huge amount of investment happening there. It's constantly changing as the product is getting enriched by the day and it still needs a lot of enhancement. We are nowhere near our finish line, this is a product that is maturing by the day and would need a lot more financial support," she quipped.

What's Driving Growth In India?

Explaining the secret sauce behind the growth of the Indian market, she said, "We have been successful in convincing the global team that we add value. And the key to it is by delivering on time. Maintaining a deadline has been crucial."

Unlike any other operating units, in India there are teams across product and engineering, support, finance, compliance, advanced taxes, and many more. Few industries such as auto, retail, manufacturing, healthcare, travel and tourism, and media are doing well for the company in India. "We expect that we should be able to penetrate further in these areas. Airlines too are performing well. We are focused on giving specialized solutions to respective industries," she explained.

Salesforce India actively caters to the Small and Medium-Sized Business (SMB) sector. They offer a range of solutions designed to help Indian SMBs grow and thrive, leveraging AI and Cloud-based technologies. Many Indian SMBs are already using Salesforce and report revenue growth through AI adoption.

"SMB space remains very much in our focus. We have packages meant specifically for the SMBs, these are called the Startup Pack. For India, we need certain additional pieces as the ecosystem here is unlike any of the other countries. Through our SaaS platform, where SMBs don't have to really spend on infrastructure, we are convinced that it's the best way to get the SME started on the digital journey. Going digital gives you the power of scaling, which otherwise would not be feasible. The SMBs are going to be the corporations of tomorrow. There is no question of us not empowering them today," she explained.

In June 2024, it launched the public sector vertical. Its close to one year now, is the development going in the right direction? "The public sector launch takes a lot of time to build as it needs compliance with all the requirements. There were various other compliance measures that we needed to take. Our own teams had to be trained as to how they ensure that these compliance matters are completely adhered to. Last year we spent in building and this year we should be seeing a little more traction here. The idea is to provide many of our solutions to this space. We see no reason why the government and its various departments, the quasi government agencies, should not be part of the story of productivity and efficiency," she noted.

A company is as good as its talent and Salesforce is no exception. When Bhattacharya came in 2020, the company was giving Trailhead, a free course, for anybody in order to learn about Salesforce and its technology. It was available in 13 colleges, then. "When I joined, there was a paucity of Salesforce resources. So, we took up the job of getting a number of these courses certified by the National Occupations Board. Next, we took these courses to colleges and we requested that they give it to their students as a credit elective. Today, we work with more than 2,500 colleges. Furthermore, we have MOUs with three state governments, whereby these courses are given to every government college, engineering college in their domain, in their state," she added.

What's next in India?

With Salesforce India revenue rising over 36 per cent to INR 9,116.3 crore in the year-ended 31 March, 2024 from the previous year, the company announced a new tower in Bengaluru. The new Salesforce Tower in Bengaluru, Salesforce's first in the country, will be one of 10 tower investments the company has made in key markets including San Francisco, New York, Chicago, London, Dublin, Sydney, Tokyo, Atlanta, and Indianapolis. Salesforce has been investing in India for over a decade. The company opened its Hyderabad Centre of Excellence in 2016 and expanded it in 2023, firmly establishing India as a leading talent and global innovation hub for Salesforce. Today, Salesforce has over 13,000 employees in India across offices in Bengaluru, Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Pune, and Jaipur.

When asked about hiring plans, the CEO said, "It's difficult to predict as of now. I think the nature of the jobs are changing and we will still need to hire people but the roles would be different. For instance, sales is something where I don't see us slowing down at all. We will be needing salespeople, not only in India but globally, because at the end of the day, sales does require human beings to actually explain and pursue the opportunity."

A few months after Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff announced plans to hire 2,000 new salespeople to sell Agentforce, its latest AI product, Salesforce was reportedly cutting 1,000 jobs. When asked about this, the president of South Asia was quick to explain, "Hirings and layoffs are all byproducts of transition, I would say. As you move from one phase to another, there will be changes in roles. Some portfolios will not be required while others will come into being. With the advent of AI, there will be waves of changes, we need people to lean in and not resist the outcomes that innovation brings along."