Salesforce sees ‘huge opportunity’ for India in AI-first shift: Benioff

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said India presents a “huge opportunity” as the company rebuilds its enterprise systems with an AI-first approach. He highlighted the role of Indian technology professionals and partners in developing new AI-driven interfaces and applications

San Francisco: Salesforce sees a “huge opportunity” for India as the company moves to rebuild its enterprise systems with an AI-first approach, with its vast pool of technology professionals and partners expected to play a key role in the transformation, CEO and co-founder Marc Benioff said.

Responding to a question from PTI, Benioff said on Tuesday that Salesforce had built “incredible teams” in India and that they would be an important part of the company’s AI-led transformation.

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“We’ve built incredible teams in India. We love the Indian people, and I think this is a huge opportunity for India. That is, we’re going to rebuild all of our enterprise systems to be AI first, and I think these intelligent interfaces — they’re going to do some of the work, and then they’re going to need partners, trailblazers, and we have millions and millions of trailblazers in India. So I’m sure that they will be a key part of this incredible story,” he said.

Benioff was addressing a press conference on the sidelines of Dreamforce 2026 here.

Explaining the technological shift under way, Benioff said Salesforce’s customers have spent decades building applications on its platform, with the underlying information stored as metadata and subsequently rendered through conventional web browsers.

“I think that the way to think about it is really like for 27 years, our customers have been building applications all over the world, including in India, and when they build those apps, they build them, and it gets decomposed into what we call metadata… It gets stored in our database, and then it gets recomposed into browsers like Safari, Chrome or Mozilla.

“Okay, now that metadata is just getting recomposed into new kinds of browsers… that you will see over the next year, to a point where there will be a family of these AI force interfaces,” he said, adding that the transition to these new AI-driven interfaces would create substantial engineering opportunities, including for technology professionals in India.

“This is going to be a tremendous opportunity (not only) for the engineers in India, but for everywhere to rebuild and kind of take all of our systems to another level. In many ways, this idea of a new interface is kind of a Y2K moment where we’re all going to have to do this really important engineering work to kind of take our capabilities from another world.”

Salesforce has had a presence in India for more than two decades and has expanded its operations in the country across technology, research and development, sales and customer support.

The company has been increasingly focusing on artificial intelligence and autonomous AI agents, integrating the technology into its enterprise software offerings as businesses look to automate tasks and provide employees with AI-powered tools.