With Agentforce IT Service, Salesforce Enters New Territory in India’s Service Market

In a media briefing in Bengaluru, Salesforce, the Software-as-Service (SaaS) giant, unveiled the seventh edition of its State of Service report. The report comes a month after the customer relationship management (CRM) leader launched Agentforce IT Service at Dreamforce, its flagship event held in San Francisco.

With the report’s launch, Salesforce aims to draw attention to its latest offerings. However, it’s stepping into unfamiliar territory — one largely ruled by ServiceNow, which commands over 50% of the market. Interestingly, ServiceNow also deepened its push into the CRM space by unveiling a wave of AI-powered capabilities at its Knowledge 2025 conference.

When The Left Shift asked Mankiran Chowhan, Managing Director - Sales & Distribution at Salesforce India, about Salesforce's unique selling proposition (USP), she said, "At Salesforce, our core mission is to help businesses connect with their customers and bring them closer. Whether it’s sales, service, or marketing — Agentforce enhances all these areas by integrating deeply within the Salesforce ecosystem.

Our biggest differentiator is our unified platform. Every part of the customer journey — from being a prospect, to becoming a lead, to a customer, to receiving service, and even driving loyalty or upsell — happens on one connected platform.

So instead of dealing with hundreds of disparate data sources, everything flows seamlessly across the same system. That unified view gives organisations real-time visibility — whether it’s a command center monitoring operations or analytics running across business units. That end-to-end integration, from prospect to service to upsell, is truly our unique advantage."

To summarise, what Chowhan emphasised — and what nearly every Salesforce spokesperson The Left Shift has interacted with continues to highlight — is the importance of Data Cloud, which is a unified data platform that brings together customer information from multiple sources in real-time, creating a single, actionable view that powers Salesforce’s AI, automation, and personalisation capabilities across all its products.

However, to get the best out of Agentforce IT Service, one might also need to be a Slack or even Service Cloud customer. Previously, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff had hinted that through Slack, Salesforce could challenge ServiceNow in the ITSM space.

When asked about the same, Deepu Chacko, VP - Solution Engineering, Salesforce India, told The Left Shift, "It really depends on the customer’s business objectives. For instance, if their goal is to transform customer service, they might start with Service Cloud. But we often recommend combining that with Slack — because the way we work is changing.

"We’re moving away from tabs, clicks, and browser pages toward a more conversational experience, and Slack enables that. It’s becoming the new operating system for organisations — bringing together teams, workflows, and AI capabilities in one place.

If you think about it, having a single interface where people spend their day — instead of jumping between multiple apps — is a huge advantage, especially when it’s powered by AI. Even within Salesforce, we rarely log into separate systems like our HR app to raise a request; we just do it directly within Slack."

Analysts have told The Left Shift previously that the Adoption of Agentforce IT Service in India could face hurdles due to its dependency on Salesforce’s broader ecosystem — particularly Service Cloud, Data Cloud, and Slack.

Many Indian enterprises remain cost-conscious and operate with fragmented legacy systems. Convincing them to invest in an integrated, premium stack may prove challenging despite Salesforce’s strong AI-driven, unified platform narrative.