India’s AI Rise Hinges On Retaining Top Talent, Says Salesforce’s Vala Afshar

India’s ability to retain its top technology talent will be critical to its ambition of becoming a major artificial intelligence hub, Salesforce chief digital evangelist Vala Afshar said, as global technology companies compete for highly skilled engineers, researchers and founders.

Afshar said there is a strong global pull for the best technology talent, with companies competing for skilled professionals as investment in AI accelerates. He made the comments in an interview with The Economic Times on the sidelines of Salesforce’s Dreamforce event in San Francisco.

The movement of Indian technology professionals overseas is not new, Afshar said. What has changed, he noted, is how Indian software companies and startups are building their businesses.

Indian founders previously tended to keep most of their teams in India while sending a founder or senior executive to the US to oversee sales and business development. Increasingly, founders are establishing themselves in the US at an earlier stage and building teams closer to global customers and investors.

That shift could make talent retention increasingly important as India seeks to build a stronger domestic AI ecosystem. Afshar said India has the ingredients to become one of the world's leading AI nations, but retaining engineers and founders will be an important part of that progress.

India already has a large technology workforce and a growing startup ecosystem, providing a base for companies developing AI products for domestic and international markets. The challenge, however, is not simply to train more workers but also to retain experienced engineers, researchers and entrepreneurs capable of building and scaling AI businesses.

The competition is intensifying as companies increase investments in generative AI, AI agents, data and automation. Salesforce itself has been expanding its AI focus in India, including through efforts to build AI skills.

In June, Salesforce said it aimed to equip one million learners in India with AI skills by 2030 through partnerships involving universities, government bodies and industry. The company has also highlighted India's rapid workplace adoption of AI.

A Salesforce study released in July found that workers in India were 45 per cent more likely than the global average to say AI was part of their core workflow, the highest share among the markets surveyed. At the same time, 38 per cent of Indian workers said their organisation had experienced an unsuccessful AI pilot during the previous year, compared with 28 per cent globally.

The findings point to both the scale of India's AI adoption and the challenges involved in turning experimentation into effective enterprise use. Salesforce said Indian workers were also more likely to identify themselves as AI sceptics, underlining the importance of trusted, contextual and personalised AI tools.