From software tools to digital colleagues – Salesforce’s Vala Afshar maps the next AI shift

As artificial intelligence moves beyond chatbots and copilots into autonomous digital workers, Salesforce believes India is uniquely positioned to emerge as one of the biggest winners of the next technology cycle. The company is making a stronger India play around “agentic AI”, betting that the country’s startup ecosystem, digital infrastructure and talent engine will help accelerate adoption.

Speaking ahead of Salesforce World Tour Mumbai, Vala Afshar, Salesforce’s chief digital evangelist, described the current AI wave as a “movement” unlike any technology transition he has witnessed, and argued that businesses are entering an era where software is no longer merely a tool but a co-worker.

“What we're experiencing is a revolution. These are capabilities we've never had in my lifetime,” Afshar said.

For Salesforce, AI is no longer confined to productivity enhancements or copilots. Afshar outlined what he described as four simultaneous waves of AI evolution: predictive AI, generative AI, agentic AI and physical AI, which includes autonomous systems such as robots, drones and self-driving technologies.

He argued that enterprises are now entering a phase in which autonomous software agents are beginning to perform work independently and collaborate alongside humans. “For about 24 years, we built software, and humans used it as a tool. Now we are onboarding software as digital colleagues,” he said. “Humans and AIs are coexisting, co-collaborating and co-creating value.”

India, according to Salesforce, may become one of the largest proving grounds for this transition.

Afshar pointed to India’s projected rise into a $5 trillion economy, with nearly $1 trillion expected to come from the digital economy by 2030. He highlighted the country’s scale advantages: over a billion internet users, the world’s largest 5G consumption base, and millions of STEM graduates entering the workforce annually.

Citing IDC estimates, he said the broader Salesforce ecosystem alone could contribute $89 billion in new revenues to India by 2028.

The company already has three million Indian learners on its Trailhead platform and around two million developers building on Salesforce technologies. But beyond macroeconomic numbers, Salesforce believes India’s startup ecosystem is becoming a significant driver of agentic adoption.

India currently hosts 131 unicorns and more than 160 AI startups, according to Afshar. Salesforce Ventures has actively backed several AI startups in the country, including firms building agent-led capabilities.

Adoption is also moving into large enterprises. Afshar cited examples such as Air India, which has deployed Salesforce’s Agentforce platform to process roughly 500,000 customer cases. Globally, Agentforce has crossed 25,000 customers and has become the fastest-growing product in Salesforce’s history.

The speed of adoption, he suggested, is fundamentally changing competitive dynamics. “You’re either an agentic business or a declining business,” Afshar said. Yet he argued that many enterprises remain overly focused on pilots and technology experimentation while underestimating the organisational disruption required to scale AI.

The harder challenge, according to him, is not technological transformation but what he called “relational transformation” — redesigning how humans and AI systems work together.

At Salesforce, around 60,000 employees now interact daily with internal AI agents through Slack. The company currently operates about 300 internal agents, a figure Afshar expects to multiply rapidly.

The shift, he said, is forcing companies to rethink structures, talent models and performance systems. Salesforce itself redeployed 3,000 employees into sales roles by reskilling workers previously involved in repetitive tasks now handled by AI systems.

“Redesign, reskill, redeploy, restructure and recalibrate,” Afshar said, describing it as a blueprint for AI transformation. He also warned that enterprise leaders often underestimate cultural barriers.

“The biggest barrier is culture,” he said. “People are not afraid of failure. They're afraid of learning.”

For India, however, he sees fewer reasons for hesitation.
Afshar pointed to a combination of startup momentum, public digital infrastructure and what he called an unusually collaborative spirit.

“There’s a spirit of curiosity and collaboration here unlike any other country I’ve experienced,” he said.

Salesforce is also tailoring products more deeply for India. The company is launching Hindi support for Agentforce Voice, reflecting the growing importance of local language experiences.

Afshar believes AI will eventually alter not just workflows but the very architecture of business itself.

He predicted that flatter organisations, hierarchies of AI agents and workplaces where humans increasingly manage networks of digital labour.
“This is ten times the impact of the industrial revolution at one-tenth the time,” he said.