“We are probably the last generation of managers that is managing just a human workforce,” says Salesforce’s Arundhati Bhattacharya

During a panel discussion at the Agentforce World Tour in Singapore, Arundhati Bhattacharya, President and CEO for South Asia for Salesforce believes that there needs to be a balanced view to where organizations are going with the agentic enterprise.

At a panel discussion during the recent Salesforce Partner Summit in Singapore, Arundhati Bhattacharya, President and CEO for South Asia for Salesforce called on partners to make the most of the opportunities that is available in the region, especially with businesses deploying AI at much faster pace.

The session which was chaired by Pravar Gautam, Vice President, Alliances & Channel ASEAN, Salesforce, was held at the sidelines of the Agentforce World Tour Singapore. Prior to the panel discussion, Gautam shared in his keynote speech that the agentic divide in organizations is very real.

“It is simply the gap between those who adopt AI successfully and those held back by bad data, wrong priorities, poor governance, and too much DIY. Now, to bridge this gap, we have a big responsibility. We must work together closely than ever before to show the real agentic value to our customers. And that is super important. And for this to happen, humans and agents need to work together to drive customer success,” Gautam said.

Gautam also pointed out that customers are no longer just buying software. Instead, they are looking at business outcomes. For partners, to serve customers in this agentic world, they need to collectively shift from selling licenses to delivering tangible, predictable, scalable business outcomes to our customers.

“And for this to happen, once again, humans and agents need to work together to drive customer success. And this also, by the way, is a mindset shift. We need to collectively move from a project delivery mindset to a value delivery mindset. I think this is super, super important as we look towards the future,” he explained.

Being enablers of change

For Bhattacharya, the current workforce is probably the last generation of managers that is managing just a human workforce with the future seeing a need for managers to manager both humans and AI agents. The key messaging here is that the agents will work together with the humans, augmenting the workforce to deliver better outcomes.

Driving this will be Salesforce’s partner ecosystem. While the tech vendor continues to innovate and provide more solutions to empower the collaboration between partners and agents towards the agentic enterprise, partners will be key in driving this collaboration.

For Bhattacharya, as the IT technology evolves, its important for everyone involved in technology to be learning on their feet as they go along. This includes the partners.

“You don't really have time to first learn and then act. You need to be agile enough and need to have people hungry enough for you to be able to learn as you go ahead and implement. That doesn't mean that you're experimenting with your customers. But it does mean that you have to put some extra effort in order to stay up to speed,” she said.

Bhattacharya also believes its imperative for partners to ensure that customers are equally involved in the deployment. This includes having the right governance calls and having all the segments meet together.

“Having this at a regular interval ensures you are meeting the milestones and also pointing out anything that might be coming in the way. Because very often the customers themselves have to give certain things to the partners in order to ensure that the project happens in time. They may need to give you the data, they may need to deliver the API, they may need to deliver many other things which you are not getting on time. So you have to have these governance calls very regularly. So that makes a big difference in the deployments if you are regularly talking to all the stakeholders in that particular room,” she explained.

Another interesting point shared by Bhattacharya is that partners need to be very careful as they approach the end of the project and make sure that customers know what to do. This includes ensuring the change management process has begun at the same time in the customer's area so that when it is released, the customers actually go ahead and implement them.

“The fact remains that for all of us is at the end of the day, if we don't have a satisfied customer, then we are not winners. We win when they win. If we can be clear that our winning is totally dependent on their winning, then I think we have the right solutions that we will be able to do what is really required to be done,” she concluded.