With more than 25 new AI apps now live on the Slack Marketplace, enterprise adoption in India is surging, especially across sectors with complex, collaborative, and high-velocity workflows. But it’s not just about boosting productivity; it’s about embedding intelligence directly where work happens. At the forefront of this shift is Rahul Sharma, Vice President – Sales, Salesforce India, who is leading the charge in helping Indian enterprises unlock agentic productivity. With over two decades of experience in building and scaling global technology businesses, Rahul Sharma is a result-driven tech leader who thrives at the intersection of innovation, execution, and enterprise transformation.
In this exclusive conversation, Rahul unpacks how AI agents are evolving from task helpers to strategic co-pilots inside Slack, why India is fast becoming a proving ground for agent-based enterprise models, and how Slack is delivering measurable ROI with Agentforce.
With 25+ new AI apps now live in the Slack Marketplace, which categories are seeing the highest enterprise traction in India and how do these apps go beyond just productivity to solve deeper workflow challenges?
We’re seeing strong enterprise traction across categories and functions where workflows are complex, time-sensitive, and deeply collaborative. What makes these apps stand out isn’t just their productivity boost. It’s how they integrate directly into Slack to remove friction from everyday workflows and drive real business outcomes.
For instance, apps like Productboard empower product teams with AI-powered customer feedback analysis directly in Slack. Product managers can instantly analyze the voice of customer data, co-author insight documents, and identify key customer needs without leaving their workflow. Additionally, Gainsight boosts customer retention with data-driven answers to customer-related questions, generated content like emails, and customer success best practices and guidance. Moreover, on the IT and HR side, Ravenna streamlines IT operations with automated help desk ticket creation, instant answers and auto-generated knowledge base articles, all directly within Slack. With all these new AI apps available in the Slack Marketplace, we're seeing a powerful shift in how work gets done - right within the conversational interface employees already use daily.
In addition to these Slack Marketplace apps, teams also work smarter and faster by accessing an intuitive, purpose-built AI experience built natively in Slack. Slack AI Huddle notes capture key takeaways and action items so users can focus on the work at hand and keep moving. On the other, AI Workflow Builder generates workflows with simple conversational prompts so users can easily automate their tasks. And now with Agentforce, we’re going even further. The most effective way to conceptualize agents in Slack is as teammates to humans – augmenting the day-to-day so that employees can focus on the more human-centric side of work. It’s a powerful shift, and we’re excited to see Indian enterprises embrace this new era of agentic productivity.
Are Indian enterprises truly using agentic AI for decision-making, or is it still limited to basic task automation and early-stage trials?
We’re seeing a meaningful shift in how Indian enterprises are approaching AI agents by moving beyond basic task automation to using them as strategic tools to scale decision-making and workforce productivity. Agentforce is designed to augment teams with trusted autonomous AI agents right in the flow of work. By embedding Agentforce into Slack, businesses can tackle long-standing productivity hurdles like fragmented data strategies that limit unified access to information, and low-value tasks that drain employee time due to manual workflows and constant context switching. With just a few clicks, organizations can deploy agents, quickly, and easily scale your workforce with a few clicks so that human employees can focus on what they do best.
The Slack Workforce Index reveals that 61% of Indian desk workers already use AI. What measurable ROI or productivity outcomes are you seeing from early adopters of Agentforce compared to those using siloed AI tools?
Slack is the work OS that unites people, apps, data, and Agentforce to move work forward and we’re already seeing measurable productivity gains. Salesforce as Customer Zero for Agentforce, scaled internal engineering support using Agentforce in Slack. In just six months, the Engineering Agent has handled 18K+ conversations and answers 130 questions per Slack channel on average per month, saving ~30 hours per channel. The agent is projected to deflect 50K+ conversations annually, equivalent to saving $1.4 million.
Globally, customers like Slalom are also tapping into unprecedented productivity with Agentforce in Slack. By leveraging intelligent agents, Slalom is revolutionising both customer support and internal workflows. For example, when a restaurant tech client, TouchBistro, aimed to improve employee and customer experience by helping teams get things right the first time, Slalom helped them build Tabitha, a knowledge agent. Instead of manually searching Salesforce and other sources, employees can invoke Tabitha in Slack for relevant answers with context for follow-up.
With AI agents now making decisions, how does Slack address the risk of bias, misinformation, or hallucinations creeping into enterprise workflows?
Agentforce in Slack operates within the same security frameworks as Salesforce and Slack, ensuring that data is handled with the utmost care. Prompts submitted to Agentforce in Slack are processed through Salesforce and securely handled using the Einstein Trust Layer. For every Agentforce interaction, the Einstein Trust Layer is working behind the scenes to protect the privacy and security of customer data, and to promote the safety and accuracy of every response.
Agent Guardrails: You are in control of what data agents can access in Slack, and create guardrails that keep agents on task and prevent unwanted behavior.
Secure LLM Gateways: Use foundational LLMs safely by preventing 3rd party LLMs from retaining or monitoring your customer and enterprise data.
Zero Data Retention: After the LLM generates a response and sends it back to Agentforce, it forgets all of that data thanks to our zero data retention agreements, because your data is not our product. Our data masking techniques prevent the LLM from seeing or processing sensitive data, like the names of companies and people.
AI Monitoring: Agentforce will constantly monitor, analyze and detect harmful language embedded in responses. We’re running toxicity scoring models in the background to identify potentially toxic, or harmful, content.