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When Arundhati Bhattacharya stepped down as the State Bank of India (SBI)’s chairperson in 2017, she never envisaged her next gig would be with an American tech firm.

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“Finance to tech was a move that was never planned,” she tells Fortune. “When this role came about, I sat on it for about five to six months, trying to make up my mind on whether to start in a new area after so many years, and after retiring.”

Bhattacharya had just wrapped up a five-year tenure as the first female head of the SBI, one of India’s largest banks, capping a career that spanned 40 years.

Yet she changed her mind after a trip to San Francisco and a meeting with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, who also handed her a copy of his book, Trailblazer. Two stories stood out to her. First was Salesforce’s decision to lobby San Francisco’s city government to increase taxes to tackle the city’s homeless problem; “I have known a large number of companies. I have never known any one of them lobbying to pay more taxes,” she muses.

The second, perhaps more relevant, point was Benioff’s decision to have annual equal pay audits—which seek to eliminate gender wage gaps. “Marc was told not to do that audit because it might mean hefty payouts. He still went ahead and did it,” she recounts. “That made a big impression on me, because I thought a company that does things like that would be one from which I could learn a lot, in terms of the values that it espoused.”

That convinced Bhattacharya to take a chance on a U.S. tech company—even as she admits she sometimes needs a “translation” to understand what tech people are saying—as she builds Salesforce’s business in one of its fastest-growing regions.

A banker turned tech executive

Bhattacharya first joined SBI in 1977 as a probationary officer, climbing up the ranks through human resources, retail banking, foreign exchange and investment banking. She became the bank’s chair in 2013, guiding SBI through a complicated merger of its five associate banks.

After leaving SBI in 2017, she spent several years cycling through part-time advisory and consulting roles before Salesforce made her an offer. Serving as a non-executive didn’t sit well with her. “You can give a lot of advice, or ask a lot of questions, but you don’t really know the impact you’re making.”

Bhattacharya joined Salesforce as its South Asia CEO in 2020; the role was so new that she had to write her own job description. “They didn’t have a regional CEO, as most of Salesforce’s operating units are for sales and distribution,” she says. “I had to think deeply about how I could contribute.”

Under Bhattacharya, Salesforce’s South Asia headcount grew from 2,500 to over 18,000 today; India now consistently ranks as one of Salesforce’s fastest growing markets. Salesforce doesn’t break out country revenue in its regular earnings, but a company filing in November to India’s corporate register reported 133.8 billion rupees ($1.8 billion) in sales for the twelve months ending March 2025.

In 2024, Salesforce expanded Bhattacharya’s profile to include Southeast Asia. She believes the expansion makes sense, given the similarities between the two regions. “Southeast Asia comprises a number of other countries which are very much like India, in the sense that they are younger and are far more populous,” she explains. “Their economies are also just a little ahead or behind where India is today, so it made sense for us to use what we had learnt in India across Southeast Asia.” For example, the diversity of languages and cultures in both India and Southeast Asia requires international firms like Salesforce to localize their products.

Salesforce estimates that AI could be a $1 trillion growth opportunity for the region. Last October, Salesforce opened an office in Manila, Philippines, adding to three existing regional hubs in Thailand, Indonesia and Singapore. Bhattacharya said that her team is looking at expanding to around three other countries in Southeast Asia, but declined to specify which ones. The company’s AI agent platform, Agentforce, is also available in five Southeast Asian languages: Tagalog, Thai, Vietnamese, Bahasa Melayu and Bahasa Indonesia.

Salesforce’s bet on AI

At the Singapore leg of its annual Agentforce World Tour series of conferences, Salesforce touted its new Headless 360, an initiative that allows AI agents to read data and trigger workflows automatically on Salesforce’s customer relationship management platform. Attendees were drawn to Slack’s booth, where a software engineer showcased the capabilities of the new-and-improved Slackbot, which the company relaunched in January as a Claude-powered agent.

Bhattacharya is now a huge proponent of Salesforce’s AI products, though she admits she needed some “reverse mentoring” from more junior engineers at the company. She says she now uses Slackbot to screen for the most important messages and tasks that come in overnight, given that India is around 12 hours ahead