'Pricing is key for adoption of generative Al by businesses'

Salesforce, the customer relationship management software maker that employs more than 9,000 people in India, is betting big on generative artificial intelligence (AI), and has doubled its total global investment corpus on generative AI startups through Salesforce Ventures.

- Leslie D'Monte & Shouvik Das

Arundhati Bhattacharya, chairperson and chief executive of Salesforce India, believes that the pricing of generative AI tools will be critical to unlock its business potential. In an interview, Bhattacharya, who was the first woman chairman of the State Bank of India before joining Salesforce, also shared her thoughts on a range of issues, including the impact of generative AI on jobs and a hybrid physical office structure. Edited excerpts:

Salesforce has made multiple announcements, including Einstein GPT, Marketing GPT, AI Cloud and more. But are businesses willing to spend on generative AI solutions, or are they only exploring the field?

Everyone’s only experimenting with it right now. Also, they don’t even know what the pricing is going to be like because the pricing of generative AI tools will not be as simple as OpenAI’s ChatGPT—they’re giving the service away at throwaway prices. Pricing is something that companies will have to understand before they really agree that generative AI is the way to go.