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The future of your business is here and it is powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI). Some view AI as a disruption, while others see it as the starting point of endless possibilities. Whatever side you are at, one thing is for certain – AI is fundamentally changing everything from how we work and shop to how we bank and create. 

The latest episode of Mint presents All About AI, powered by Salesforce, brought together senior leaders from diverse industries to understand how businesses are navigating this shift, and their insights reveal a roadmap for success in this new era. 

The AI wave: Jump in or get left behind

Think of AI as a powerful wave. You can stand on the sidelines and watch it pass, or you can jump in and ride it. For Arundhati Bhattacharya, President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Salesforce South Asia, the choice is simple. She warns that resisting this wave will only overwhelm you. Instead, she urges everyone to “get your toes wet”, because this is not a technology that is going away. She believes that for any company to be sustainable, productive and efficient, it needs to get into the game.

“Just as you can’t swim if you stand on the side of a swimming pool and learn by theory how to swim. You also can’t really understand what Agentforce can do for you unless you are in the water and flailing around. But as you flail, you’ll learn to float, you will learn to swim, and then you learn to do a lot of things,” said Bhattacharya.

This sentiment is seconded by Arun Kumar Parameswaran, EVP and Managing Director – Sales and Distribution (South Asia) at Salesforce. “I think the big change is that progressive organisations have figured out that you can’t wait for the perfect use case. Technology is evolving at such a rapid pace that even your best use cases that are showing you the best results could be obsolete in 12-18 months,” he said.

According to him, progressive organisations are embracing a “fail fast, learn fast” mindset so that they don’t get left behind. He cited the example of Bajaj Finance, who call themselves a “Fin AI company” and have stated that AI is going to be in every aspect of our business. The key to this mindset, he explains, is setting clear guardrails and a foundational architecture for trust, data handling, and security. Once those are in place, every function should be empowered to innovate at its own pace.

AI for enhancing human expertise

Bhattacharya also provided an insightful perspective on the role of AI, particularly “Agentic AI”. She shared a personal anecdote, wishing for a personal avatar to handle her travels, which she dislikes. “But, I don’t think we are there yet. It’s still humans with agents. We have automated agents now that can really take off the drudgery from your job and leave you to be more creative, to be more in touch with your customers. Basically, agents allow humans to be more human,” she said. 

This partnership between human and tech is also at the core of Shweta Gupta’s strategy. As Vice President, Information Technology at Genpact, she sees AI adoption as a matter of “taking human and the tech together”.

“It’s not about replacing the human, but tech enabling the human side by side to see what they can automate,” she said.

Genpact is not only adopting AI for its clients but also internally, with its Chief Technology Officer driving a client zero program – a kind of testing ground for the company’s own AI solutions. They have deployed more than 100 AI solutions across finance, sales, and marketing to drive key outputs and improve efficiency. 

Gupta shared four main principles that are leading the change for her company and its clients. These include using using AI to enable people and not replace them, being ready learn from both successes and failures while innovating, using AI responsibly and integrating ethical considerations into every stage of development, from design to deployment and, finally, ensuring every AI solution has a clear purpose and a measurable Return on Investment (ROI).

Some real-world applications

AI is already being deployed for a central part of operations across several industries. Saiprasad Potaraju, Head – Enterprise Applications at Hero FinCorp, spoke about how AI is integrated into every step of their credit lending process. During customer onboarding, AI ensures the right data is captured and deciphers, validates, and verifies documents. For the underwriting process, they use a lot of AI and ML models to make faster decisions based on data from multiple sources. After a customer is onboarded, AI is used in collections to understand the right mechanism to use for defaulting customers and recover the money.

Looking ahead, he felt the role of Agentic AI is only going to deepen. “We are a regulated entity, where AI and agents, can play a role in understanding or interpreting the regulations that come up from RBI and the other sectors, and then see how we respond to each of these by putting right controls in the system, rather than being reactive, being proactive, using Agentforce,” he said.

In the luxury retail sector, AI is enhancing a human-centric experience. Rajendran S, Chief Marketing Officer of Orra Fine Jewellery, said Orra’s unique selling proposition is to sell diamonds as a “piece of art” rather than a commodity. Towards this, the company curates a “valet to valet” journey for every customer walking into their 100+ stores.  “A customer who’s sitting right in front of a sales person needs to know what he’s buying, and needs to know the inspiration of the designs of what we are making,” he said.

Here, AI acts as a coach for Orra’s sales teams, who are dealing with large SKUs where each design has a unique story to tell. “Each of this design has got a story. How does the sales guy know what it is?” he said.

He also detailed how AI is integral to their marketing strategy. Orra uses performance marketing to drive footfalls to stores and generate leads. This entire performance marketing effort is now being replicated on Salesforce with an AI layer. The AI helps create lookalikes and target audiences with “far more precision, far more focused”.  Without this AI layer, performance marketing is already contributing 4 per cent to their top line. Additionally, AI is used in their Service Cloud to take all customer feedback, queries, and Google reviews seriously. It helps to templatise responses and ensures they are addressed within a certain timeframe.

Customer engagement in AI era

When it comes to engaging customers, AI is breaking down old barriers. Towards this, AI has solved the challenge of connecting with customers at scale. The barrier to creating a more human-like digital experience has always been the scale of people and or content.

Stephen Hammond, EVP/ GM, Marketing Cloud at Salesforce, explained that AI has opened up the ability for a natural language experience where a person can express their interests, and the agent or AI system can interpret that and provide a more relevant response. This is all made possible by data and a deep understanding of the individual and the brand.

Hammond’s advice for businesses is clear: “Acknowledging that things are changing is very important. So that comes in terms of speed and getting ahead of things. The way that brands connect with individuals will now start to really go through agents. And so I think it’s really important that companies understand that that is the coming future, and it’s really important for them to get that information now, because they need to start making sure that they’re ahead of the game.” 

To stay ahead, he feels a company needs to have a clear organisation of its data. “Without having a clear understanding of who your customer is and what their interests are, you can’t really engage them properly,” he added. He also said that the data must be “actionable”, and linked back to the systems of action.

Disclaimer: This is a Mint editorial initiative, sponsored by Salesforce.