AI brings pain and promise: Salesforce chief sees rise of new job roles in India and beyond

As the workplace evolves to include a stronger partnership between humans and autonomous agents, Arundhati Bhattacharya, president and CEO of Salesforce – South Asia, said that this shift is leading to the creation of new job roles such as unstructured engineers, machine learning engineers, and prompt engineers.

Bhattacharya said that the transition would bring some disruption, with certain skill sets becoming obsolete, but would ultimately result in new employment opportunities. "There will be some pain in transition. There always is. But at the end of the day, you will find many new jobs being created, jobs that were not there at all. We didn't know about retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) till recently. We didn't have this many ethics officers or compliance officers. So, the nature of jobs will change," she said in Bengaluru on Friday.

Last year, Salesforce launched its autonomous AI application, Agentforce, which is designed to provide specialised support to employees and customers. The application operates across multiple communication channels and engages in natural language interactions around the clock. It sets up security guardrails and escalates conversations to human employees when required.

"Agentforce will allow humans to become more human. Instead of wasting time on my screen replying to repetitive stuff, those can be done by the agent while I call a client and talk to them. I use agentic AI in my work life, which assists me in summarising calls and getting the transcript when we are not able to be present on the calls. We have a lot of training sessions, and we were required to pitch to our peers to confirm that the training was complete. Agentforce doesn't give me passing marks just because I'm the boss. It tells me exactly where my tone went wrong and where my language was incorrect. It's very objective," Bhattacharya said.

Currently, autonomous agents are writing 30% of the code at Salesforce. According to Arun Parameswaran, executive vice president and managing director of sales at Salesforce South Asia, this figure is expected to rise to 50% by the end of the year.

Agentforce, the company’s AI platform that enables organisations to build and deploy autonomous AI agents, has demonstrated 93% accuracy in handling tasks for a European airline client. Internally, Salesforce’s own support helpline has seen 84% of queries being resolved by agents, resulting in a 50% reduction in the need for escalation to human representatives.

Among Salesforce’s Indian clients is Air India, which has started using Agentforce to upgrade its user interface. The airline claims that its refund process time has been significantly reduced due to the use of the platform.

Parameswaran said the current macroeconomic pressures caused by tariff wars have not had a direct impact on Salesforce’s business, though its clients are in a wait-and-watch mode.

India remains a critical growth region for the company, and Salesforce’s increasing investment in the market reflects this strategic focus.

The company also operates an online learning platform, Trailhead, aimed at upskilling users. Its Trailblazer community in India, which includes developers, administrators, architects, IT leaders, and customer innovators, has over 3.9 million members.

(with ToI inputs)