Bangalore Salesforce: Cloud-based customer relationship software maker Salesforce has doubled its workforce in India in the last 18 months and is expected to have 6,500 employees by January 31. The company is betting big on India for its product development capabilities. In an interview, Sanket Atal, Senior Vice President and Managing Director, SITE, Salesforce India, talked about the latest trends in the CRM space, India’s startup ecosystem, etc. Edited excerpt:
Which tech trends excite you the most?
To me, the most useful and practical technologies are the most exciting. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being discussed everywhere, but how can you implement AI as part of your strategy to make it accessible to all? For example, our AI bot, Einstein, helps salespeople with suggestions and guesses, which is a good practical use case. Machine Learning (ML) becomes essential for whatever you want to do. We are big on analytics and AI, which go hand in hand.
How’s the $27.7 billion acquisition of Slack faring in the current working scenario?
No matter where you are, you should have access to enterprise technologies in an easy-to-use way. For this we are taking great advantage of Slack. We are continuing to integrate products with Slack and becoming a Slack-first company. The big thing we are all looking forward to is for companies to go digital first and have a digital headquarters. Now, if work is something you do and every place you go, your access to the technologies of Digital Headquarters becomes important.
How do you think the data will be consumed and used differently in the future?
Consumption of data is a journey and what matters is the knowledge gained from it. Data is forever with most companies that try to run an analytics application and gain insights by correlating them. It would be great to get relevant information and intelligence from that data. Therefore, the data should be relevant and provided in an easily consumable manner.
Users will be able to decipher the insights rather than getting the insights themselves or you will need a data scientist to tell you that x,y,z is going to happen. It will democratize the use of data. As far as data is concerned, it should be a foundation on top of which we have various tools like analytics to provide recommendations in a relevant and easy-to-use manner.
You have doubled your workforce in the past 18 months; What kind of growth are you expecting here?
Over the past few years, we have been growing at 28% year-on-year. We currently have about 5,000 employees, and by January 31st we will have over 6,500 employees.
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