Indian firms are moving towards production deployments of AI solutions, with Salesforce South Asia CEO Arundhati Bhattacharya confirming this shift during Dreamforce 2026. Speaking to PTI on the sidelines of the conference, Bhattacharya stated that 'Yes, they (Indian companies) are moving towards putting things in production', responding to questions about whether Indian firms were moving towards large-scale deployment after experimenting with generative AI and AI agents. The company sees India entering a phase of wider enterprise AI adoption, with the country offering significant 'white space' for digital and agentic AI growth. Salesforce plans to continue investing in physical infrastructure, upskilling Indian talent and recruitment, with a new tower in Bengaluru expected to come on stream next calendar year as part of these investments. As businesses deploy increasing numbers of autonomous AI agents, Salesforce President and Chief Platform and Engineering Officer Rohan Kumar emphasized that enterprises would need stronger systems to manage security, governance, costs and agent activity, with IT and security teams increasingly taking responsibility for managing AI agents.
Salesforce unveiled AIforce at Dreamforce 2026, a new live interface layer that connects enterprise data and workflows to AI tools, alongside expanded partnerships with Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and NVIDIA. CEO and co-founder Marc Benioff described this as 'an interface revolution', comparing it to previous interface transitions from DOS to GUIs, web to mobile. Benioff emphasized that AI interfaces will be dynamic and intelligent, composable and alive, working with users in fundamental application administration, building applications, and operating applications. The AIforce joins Salesforce's existing unified Data 360 context layer, Customer 360 app, and semantic intelligence layer, positioning the company to compete effectively in the agentic AI revolution. Salesforce President and Chief Platform and Engineering Officer Rohan Kumar said the company's vision for the 'agentic enterprise' rests on a four-layer architecture comprising Data 360, Customer 360, Agentforce and AIforce.
Salesforce and NVIDIA announced the launch of Koa, a new reasoning engine that integrates decades of enterprise expertise into AI models. As reported by Salesforce, Koa is built entirely from synthetic scenarios that simulate real-world enterprise workflows across more than 14 industries, including manufacturing, financial services, healthcare, and travel. The model was trained using Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with NVIDIA NeMo RL, NeMo Gym, and NeMo AutoModel. Koa is already in use inside Salesforce, including an agent in Slack that helps employees find information and complete everyday tasks, and is now moving into customer pilots with 1-800Accountant, Baxter Credit Union, Engine, Formula 1, UChicago Medicine, and Xero.
According to PTI, Arun Parameswaran, EVP and Managing Director, Sales and Distribution (South Asia), reported significant success in financial services AI deployment. Agents are reducing turnaround times in vehicle-loan sales and credit underwriting, with processes that earlier took hours or days being reduced to minutes. The company is seeing companies move rapidly from AI experimentation to production, particularly in financial services, with enterprises likely to initially deploy AI agents for lower-risk tasks before gradually allowing them to handle more consequential decisions as trust, security and contextual understanding improve. Kumar noted that IT leaders and security leaders are taking on newer roles in managing AI agents, with security teams establishing agent identities and monitoring their actions.
Benioff highlighted India's significant opportunity in Salesforce's AI transformation strategy, citing the country's vast pool of technology professionals and partners as key contributors. As reported by PTI, the CEO stated that India has built incredible teams and expressed confidence that these resources will play a crucial role in the company's AI-led transformation. The Trailblazers community, which celebrates its 20th anniversary at Dreamforce this year, has built 12 million apps, driving 9.6 billion API calls every day, putting 156 million lines of AI-generated code, and earning more than 151 million badges on Trailhead, demonstrating India's substantial contribution to Salesforce's global ecosystem. Kumar believes India's strong developer community could put the country among the leading markets for agentic innovation by 2030, stating that 'If I had to say, looking around the world, where are the countries where you see the top cutting-edge innovation in the agentic enterprise, I absolutely believe India is going to be at the top of the list'. The executives noted that India's technology workforce would need to reskill as AI changes the nature of software and enterprise technology jobs, with repetitive work increasingly handled by AI allowing employees to focus on more specialized roles.
