Salesforce eyes manufacturing boom in India through AI and cloud solutions
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Manufacturing is a growing customer segment for Salesforce in India, said Arundhati Bhattacharya, the US-headquartered company's president and CEO for South Asia.While manufacturing has traditionally been slower in adopting digital platforms than sectors such as banking and financial services, she said there is an opportunity to empower this segment with more data and insights.'Your sales, your distribution, your supply chains - all of this, if you can take it to a digital transformation , you can improve the agility of the way you behave and the way you react,' Bhattacharya said.The challenges are different across sectors such as automotives, solar and ceramics, she said, which is why the company adopts an industry-wise approach to speaking with and offering solutions to customers.The multinational software-as-a-service firm on Tuesday announced a digital transformation partnership with the Haryana-based bathroom and lighting products maker Jaquar Group for an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered mobile-first platform to boost customer engagement, revenue growth, productivity and operational efficiency.Salesforce also counts appliances and consumer goods maker Godrej among its customers.'We believe the future of manufacturing and retail lies in data agility, mobile responsiveness and real-time decision-making,' said Rajesh Mehra, director and promoter of the Jaquar Group, adding that the aim is to future-proof the organisation by embedding intelligence into every customer interaction and operational touchpoint.The eventual goal is to adopt agentic AI , said Ninad Raje, chief information officer, Jaquar Group.Agentic AI refers to AI systems that can carry out workflows autonomously. Salesforce last year launched an agentic AI platform Agentforce.Agentic AI provides a 'digital workforce', according to Bhattacharya. It can enable companies to grow and scale up without having to increase the number of people they have.'On the plant floor... the amount of digitisation that is used is still a little restricted, but that will also change,' said Bhattacharya. 'We believe that the next phase that's going to come, we now have autonomous digital agents, we will soon see this also get married to robotics, at which point of time the plant floors will also undergo changes.'Further, cloud adoption allows for greater agility compared to on-premise server infrastructure, as it can be tapped flexibly depending on a company's need rather than having to size for peak capacity at all times, she said.'We also have to start understanding what are the security measures over there, instead of just having a perception that this is very insecure,' Bhattacharya said.
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