Salesforce’s Arundhati Bhattacharya on the Power of GenAI

Arundhati Bhattacharya, Chairperson and CEO of Salesforce India and former chairperson of the State Bank of India, shares her inspirational story of why she moved from India’s largest bank to head the India business of a Fortune 500 MNC, and how she sees the progress of Generative AI adoption by corporates in India  

From heading the country’s largest bank to becoming the chairperson and India CEO of a global tech giant, Arundhati Bhattacharya’s story is an inspiration for everyone. We had the opportunity to interact with her to understand why she moved from being a leading figure in finance to joining the tech industry, and to understand her views on the most talked about technology today - Generative AI.

The Transition from Public to Private Sector

Arundhati’s transition is indeed a very interesting and a challenging one considering the diversity of the two fields. But she took on the challenge after retiring as a banker, primarily because of her love and passion for technology and the whole digital space. “Though I don't come from that field, but my husband, was one of the persons who setup the computer science department in IIT Kharagpur. So to that extent, he comes from this area, and maybe that has spiked my interest in technology”, said Arundhati. She’s very excited about the move as it gives her a ringside seat of all tech advancements and revolutionary developments like Generative AI. Plus, it gives her the opportunity to work with a lot of youngsters and understand how they see the world, which makes her even more enthusiastic and energetic…and of course learn their “lingo” along the way. “I wouldn’t have known what FOMO was for instance”, she laughed. 

Going deeper into her reasons for this change, Arundhati feels that while the solution to every problem in a large country like India is education, the solution to offering good quality services in any field is technology. This could be across services that are as diverse as healthcare, legal, and education. In healthcare for instance, most hospitals are overrun and doctors overworked. If Generative AI could be used to assist them, it could reduce the burden of their basic tasks and enable them to concentrate on their patients more. “The human touch in healthcare is so important when a person is unwell”, she added. In the legal system also, GenAI could be used to write the initial draft, which could then be fine-tuned. A GenAI based co-pilot for instance, could answer all the questions in natural language and reduce the workload of legal workers. 

In education, she added that as the average class sizes in India are of 60-65 students, it’s not possible to give each student equal attention as per their caliber. That’s why they’re all taught the same thing, whereas in reality, not all of them have the same potential. Some could be good dancers while others good in sports, and yet some others might be good in mathematics, etc. “Till now, it was not possible to discover each student’s potential, and yet we put them together, give them all the same syllabus, and expect similar results, which is not going to happen”, she added. As a result, some students forge ahead while others lag behind. With a technology like Generative AI, you could actually create individualized curriculums so that it could be tracked and monitored individually. This would enable people to learn things they want to learn and are good at, at their own pace, and thereby realize much more of their potential than what we are doing today. 

AI Fears and Apprehensions

Though Generative AI has so many benefits, it has a fair share of apprehensions. One major fear people have is of job losses, but Arundhati feels this normally happens in every industrial revolution, but ultimately it helps uplift the standard of living and the jobs marketplace. So, she believes that this will eventually lead to a growth in jobs and improve our standard of living. Speaking of other apprehensions in the industry, Arundhati feels that they clearly need to talk it out so that they can be understood better. One apprehension for instance, is whether it can be trusted. This, according to Arundhati and even the company’s global CEO, Marc Benioff, is Salesforce’s top priority for which the company has created a trust layer. With Salesforce being a SaaS platform, they have greater responsibility because all customer data comes to their platform. They can’t treat it as their own product, but as customer data. “So, our duty is to try to protect it and not break their trust”, she added. 

In fact, the company even has a trust site that lists any kind of breakdowns, stoppages or difficulties. The company allows anybody to see it to ensure transparency and trustworthiness. 

So though the apprehensions around GenAI are real, but we must understand that anything that evolves or is discovered has the capacity to do harm as well as good. “Just because it has the potential to do harm doesn’t mean you can stop the change. So, it is better to recognize that there are issues and see how to solve them, monitor and regulate them”, she added.

India’s Progress in AI Adoption

There is a lot of interest in GenAI, and India might be among the early adopters. Also, the technology is still very new and there are many things we don't know about it including the various risks associated with it. “We see a number of companies experimenting with it, but not too many have put actual use cases into action”, she said. 

Another issue that’s preventing mass proliferation of GenAI solutions is that it needs to be on the cloud. There’s very little of GenAI that’s happening on-prem, according to Arundhati. Cloud is a prerequisite to GenAI because the kind of compute capacity required is too high to setup in on-prem systems, as it would be very capital intensive. Plus, you’ll not use that kind of compute capacity all the time, so it’s far easier to do it in the cloud where you can increase and decrease your compute capacity as per your needs. 

Legacy industries like BFSI will adopt it very fast because they are far more mature than other industries. Other industries like pharma will also adopt it quite fast, followed by social services industries like healthcare. Plus of course, the entire service area that she had pointed our earlier, should be adopting it because it will allow them to do their jobs much faster. The IT industry itself will of course adopt it. 

Other legacy industries in India that are late adopters of cloud must re-think their cloud strategies as quickly as possible if they want to join the GenAI revolution. These include manufacturing, many public sector units of either banks, utility companies, power generating companies, etc. 

Then of course, there are a lot of companies that are yet to even start their digital journey, especially in the public sector space. So basically, some companies are digitally very mature and others are not, but are very keen on becoming so. Company size doesn’t matter here. Sometimes some of the bigger companies are very digitally mature. 

Salesforce’s Focus for India

Our area of focus for Salesforce is to create more awareness about what the company is doing. “We are not just a CRM company, but a partner in digital transformation”, said Arundhati. The company focuses on the customer experience layer, be it sales, service, marketing, commerce, ecommerce, analytics, integration, scaling. 

Moreover, the company has also created verticalized industry wise solutions out of the box so that they could be implemented quickly and deliver the required RoI. Currently, 12 separate industry wise solutions are available for industries like healthcare, life sciences, financial services, automotive, manufacturing, to name a few. Plus, there’s a net zero solution that monitors carbon footprint, divides it into three tracks and takes into account what you're doing to offset it. It then tells you how much more you need to do in order to become net zero. 

While the focus in India is sales, but a large part of the team is doing products engineering and support as well. 

When GenAI will see Rapid Adoption

According to Arundhati, mass adoption of GenAI will take some time as people are still working through a lot of things. Salesforce has added GenAI in a number of things like some of the copilots. For others, the process is on dates for them have been announced. More importantly, we must also understand that there must be enablement of the ecosystem of people, partners, and professional services providers. Plus, customers must also understand it and decide whether this is what they really want to do. 

So, there will be lots of pilots in the beginning starting with a small department or a small journey to see whether it's giving the desired results. “In the long term, it’s going to happen and nobody should believe that it can be stopped”, she concluded. 

Interview by Anil Chopra, VP, CMR