Sri Lanka can leapfrog into agentic AI era: Salesforce South Asia CEO
Daily Mirror: Sri Lanka’s comparatively lower level of digital activity gives its businesses an opportunity to leapfrog into agentic artificial intelligence (AI) and become globally competitive, Salesforce South Asia President and CEO Arundhati Bhattacharya said at a virtual press conference held recently.
Responding to media queries, Bhattacharya noted that Salesforce has been engaging regularly with the local clients to demonstrate the value of becoming an Agentic Enterprise, a model in which the AI agents orchestrate workflows alongside human employees, with a human retained in the loop to validate the outcomes.
“While Sri Lanka may not yet have become as digitally active as some other markets, I believe this gives the country an opportunity to leapfrog,” she remarked, cautioning that she did not believe the businesses could remain relevant over the long term without a strong technology backbone.
She added that Salesforce was keen to bring its latest technologies into Sri Lanka and ensure that the local enterprises have equal opportunities to deploy them, surfacing the latent demand that is not yet sufficiently visible for the companies to capitalise on.
Pointing to early traction in the market, Bhattacharya revealed that Salesforce’s first Innovation Day in Colombo, held on August 31, had been planned for around 400 participants but drew approximately 800 registrations, double the target, with some 600 professionals attending, 50 percent above the planned audience.
“So, there is clearly a huge amount of curiosity and interest among the businesses in ensuring that they are not left behind and that they too move towards becoming Agentic Enterprises,” she observed.
Among the capabilities outlined at the briefing was AIforce, which extends Salesforce data and business logic into third-party interfaces, beginning with Claudeforce, a partnership with Anthropic, in which Claude serves as the front end while Salesforce supplies the enterprise context and grounding.
The company also detailed Koa, a CRM reasoning model built with NVIDIA Nemotron technology and an Enterprise AI Harness that wraps large language models in governed data, guardrails and permission controls.
Meanwhile, Salesforce South Asia Vice President of Solution Engineering Gavin Barfield argued that the consumable, out-of-the-box agents would help prevent an AI divide from opening between large corporates and smaller firms without sizeable IT budgets.
“It is important that the SMEs are able to take advantage of this technology in exactly the same way that the larger enterprises can,” he told the briefing.
OSL take:
Sri Lanka’s accelerating digital transformation is creating emerging business/investment opportunities for foreign businesses and investors, particularly in AI, cloud technology, automation and digital services. The country’s relatively lower level of digital adoption could allow businesses to leapfrog legacy systems and adopt newer AI-driven technologies, creating opportunities for international technology companies to introduce solutions without the constraints of extensive older infrastructure. AI presents potential across sectors including banking, tourism, healthcare, manufacturing, logistics, retail and Government services, while demand is also likely to grow for cloud infrastructure, cybersecurity, data management and AI-enabled business services. Strong interest in Salesforce’s recent Innovation Day in Colombo, which attracted around 800 registrations against a target of 400, indicates growing interest among local businesses in adopting advanced technologies. For foreign businesses/investors, Sri Lanka could therefore offer opportunities not only as a market for AI products but also as a base for technology partnerships, software development, business-process services and AI-enabled exports. As local enterprises seek to strengthen their technology backbone, the digital economy could become an increasingly important area for foreign investment and international collaboration.
| Article Code : | VBS/AT/20261002Z_4 |