Salesforce is navigating through a striking contrast as on one side, its global CEO Marc Benioff is making headlines for pausing the hiring of new software engineers, citing productivity gains of more than 30 percent from its AI stack, while projecting a spend of approximately US $300 million on Anthropic AI tokens in 2026.
On the other side, Arundhati Bhattacharya, Chairperson and CEO of Salesforce India, in a closed-door media interaction spoke to CIO&Leader about India’s growth trajectory from 2,500 people five years ago to more than 17,000 today. She clarified operations in India is not a support function for global delivery, but it is part of a globally integrated product and engineering mandate.
“Hiring continues depending upon our requirements, and the requirements may change, or the capabilities that we are looking for may change,” Bhattacharya said. “It is something that is evolving and as per the requirements we have. We started with 2,500 people in 2020, we are at 17,000-plus today — we have grown quite rapidly, and to that extent I am satisfied with the way operations have grown in this country.”
Bhattacharya also clarified that India operations are not siloed or localised support function. It is embedded in Saleforce’s global product and engineering mandate. “All of our product and engineering is global in nature, it is not local in nature,” Bhattacharya said. “Wherever the teams are placed — and a lot of teams are placed in India as well — they serve the global mandate. Globally we decide what is going to be on the roadmap, and accordingly it is developed.”
The implication was that India-based engineers are not working on India-specific builds. They are contributing to the same product roadmap that serves Salesforce’s global customer base. When capabilities are added to Agentforce or Slack, Indian engineering teams are part of that work. The hiring freeze on software engineers in the United States does not translate directly into a ceiling on what Salesforce India builds or who it needs to build it.