India‘s enterprises are poised to shape the next wave of workplace AI by redesigning how work gets done for humans and machines to operate as teammates, not by simply automating old processes, a Salesforce India executive said.
Himanshu Rajpal, regional sales director at Salesforce India, said the country’s corporate sector was uniquely positioned to lead what he called the “connected intelligence” revolution because it operates at a scale and diversity few markets can match, with teams spread across metros and tier-2 cities and collaboration happening across languages, generations and work styles.
“This complexity is teaching us something powerful: the future isn’t about layering AI onto old ways of working,” Rajpal said. “It’s about fundamentally reimagining how work gets done when humans and AI operate as teammates, not tools.”
Indian companies that are adopting AI successfully are moving beyond task automation and building “agentic operating models” where decision making is more distributed, institutional knowledge is easier to access and execution happens faster, he said.
In that model, teams are designed to act as a connected system rather than a collection of functions, with AI agents helping surface relevant information, suggest next steps and accelerate routine workflows.
The shift matters for India’s fast-growing digital economy where organisations are often managing rapid expansion, high customer volumes and geographically dispersed operations.
Many businesses are also balancing legacy systems with new cloud and AI deployments while trying to improve productivity and responsiveness without adding layers of complexity.
Rajpal said the competitive edge in this environment is not only the technology stack but how intelligently an organisation thinks and acts as one. Companies that build shared, real-time visibility into information and decisions will be able to execute faster and respond more effectively to customers and markets, he added.
Salesforce says connected intelligence to become competitive advantage
“In 2026, we’ll see connected intelligence becoming the next competitive advantage and for India’s fastest-growing companies, Slack will be the foundation of that advantage,” Rajpal said.
Salesforce owns Slack, a workplace messaging and collaboration platform, and has been positioning it as a hub where people, data and AI can meet.
Rajpal said Slack is evolving from a communication tool into an operating layer for enterprise intelligence, where human expertise and AI capabilities converge, knowledge is activated in real time and execution happens at what he called the “speed of ambition”.
