Salesforce to add 7 Indian languages as enterprise AI adoption gathers pace

Global CRM firm Salesforce is preparing to add seven more Indian languages to its enterprise voice platform and expand local data hosting infrastructure in India, as companies across sectors move AI and automation projects into production.

The additional Indian language capabilities for Agentforce Voice in Tamil , Marathi , Telugu are currently in beta testing and are expected to be rolled out in the coming weeks, Arun Kumar Parameswaran, EVP and Managing Director, Sales and Distribution, South Asia, Salesforce, told Business Today. Together with Hindi and English, the languages are expected to cover nearly 95-97% of customer language requirements in India, he said.

Salesforce launched Hindi support for Agentforce Voice earlier this month to enable enterprises to support Hindi and Hinglish interactions across customer service channels. The platform has been designed to understand code-switching between Hindi and English and support conversational workflows.

The company is seeing increased adoption across financial services, retail and real estate. Parameswaran said enterprises are now moving beyond experimental projects and focusing on measurable business outcomes.

“One of the reasons why 95% of pilots do not go into production is because they do not have a solid business case backing them. No CFO wants to put money into a technology that does not return value,” he said.

Parameswaran said Indian enterprises are currently using AI more for customer acquisition and revenue growth than purely for labour cost reduction, unlike many mature markets.

“In mature markets, a customer service interaction may cost between $3 and $7, so automation directly reduces costs. In India, that same interaction may cost ₹7. So, companies here are looking at customer experience and topline growth,” he said.
The company cited financial services as one of the strongest use cases in India. Hero FinCorp, for instance, has reduced two-wheeler loan approval timelines from days to under 30 seconds using automated workflows, while also improving the quality of applications being processed, according to Parameswaran.

Salesforce is also seeing increased deployments in real estate. Tata Realty & Infrastructure recently implemented Salesforce’s Agentforce platform across customer engagement functions. According to company data, the deployment reduced first response times from days to eight hours, increased lead qualification rates by 30% and improved conversion rates by 10%.

The company is also expanding its infrastructure footprint in India. Salesforce recently announced plans to bring MuleSoft on Hyperforce to India, enabling enterprises to deploy integrations and APIs while storing and processing data locally within the country.

Parameswaran said enterprises continue to face challenges around fragmented data environments spread across multiple systems and locations.

“The problem is not lack of data. The problem is that the data sits in silos. Enterprises want to use AI, but they also need trusted and harmonised data across systems,” he said.

“If we can make technology work at India scale and cost structures, it can work anywhere else in the world,” Parameswaran said, pointing to customers managing databases with hundreds of millions of records.

While enterprise demand is increasing, organisations continue to face challenges around governance, workforce skills and employee retention during large technology transitions, he said.

“The most successful deployments are where there is a clear mandate from the top leadership. Without that, many projects remain pilots without measurable business outcomes.”