“There is no question that we are going to move into an incredible moment in India. And you know it’s a very exciting opportunity, we have invested very aggressively in India,” Benioff said.
India not only performs engineering and support functions for the company, but large Indian customers have seen significant success on the Salesforce platform, he said.
Benioff was speaking to the media at the company’s 22nd annual conference, Dreamforce, in San Francisco, where the company is headquartered.
While Indian IT services firms are increasingly partnering with Salesforce to build capabilities and solutions, Benioff said employees of companies such as Accenture, IBM, Capgemini, Deloitte and KPMG are Salesforce “trailblazers”.
“We have our own services teams, but in addition to that we work with top services teams of the world,” Benioff said. “For these folks, who have hundreds of thousands of professionals who are in the field, working with customers, it’s critical that we enable and train them. A lot of them are already next-generation Salesforce platform users.”
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Salesforce has become a key partner for Indian IT services firms. In May, a note by analysts from CLSA said among Indian IT companies, Persistent and Infosys have the most employee and revenue exposure towards Salesforce. Among mid-tier IT companies, Persistent has the largest pool of employees certified on Salesforce.While 30% of Persistent employees have Salesforce certifications, Accenture and Cognizant have 10% of their staffers trained on the platform, and Infosys has 6%, said the note.
Benioff also highlighted the “phenomenal management team” Salesforce has in India under Arundhati Bhattacharya, a former State Bank of India chairperson who now leads the company’s operations in the country.
Salesforce has increased its India headcount in the last two years and has its biggest local office in Hyderabad. Outside the US, Hyderabad houses its largest centre of excellence.
On Monday, the company unveiled Agentforce, a suite of autonomous AI agents.
Benioff said Agentforce represents the third wave of AI — “advancing beyond copilots to a new era of highly accurate, low-hallucination intelligent agents”.
The reporter was in San Francisco at the invitation of Salesforce.
