The Agentforce Playbook for Indian SMBs: Sales, Marketing, Service & IT

Key Takeaways

• Indian SMBs with AI report 95% more efficient operations, with 97% seeing improvements to productivity, revenue, or customer experience — according to our  sixth edition of Small and Medium Business Trends Report.
• With over 5.9 crore registered SMBs employing more than 25 crore people and contributing 45% of India’s total exports, the sector is embracing technology: 78% are using or experimenting with AI.
• Real Indian businesses like Hubilo, aha, and Jaipur Rugs prove agentic AI transforms sales, marketing, service, and IT operations — without massive tech teams or budgets.

When Hubilo faced a pandemic-driven surge in virtual event demand, their fragmented sales systems weren’t ready. Multiple tools, spreadsheets, and disconnected workflows meant slow quotes and missed opportunities. Sound familiar?

This is the execution gap facing Indian SMBs today. Not lack of customers—India has over 5.9 crore registered SMBs employing more than 25 crore people, accounting for 45% of the nation’s total exports. But serving them at scale? That’s the constraint.

Here’s what changed for Hubilo: Salesforce consolidated sales, CRM, service, and analytics on a single platform. Quotes that previously took days now generate 9× faster. Partners manage seamlessly. Sales reps save hours through automated data capture. That’s not just automation — it’s augmentation that enables growth.

The Indian SMB advantage: moving fast without breaking the bank

Indian businesses face unique opportunities and constraints. Salesforce research shows 78% of Indian SMBs are using or experimenting with AI — amongst the highest adoption rates globally. But here’s the constraint: the average SMB uses seven different business applications, with over half reporting data inconsistencies across tools.

Whilst demand surges, most Indian SMBs operate with lean teams, limited budgets, and fragmented technology. A Chennai logistics company might use WhatsApp for customers, Excel for orders, and manual calls for follow-ups. Data sits in silos. Processes depend on people. Growth means hiring more hands.

Enter the AI shift. Salesforce data shows 95% of Indian SMBs with AI report more efficient operations, with improvements across productivity (97% report gains), revenue (96% see lift), and customer experience (97% improve). More tellingly, 79% of Indian SMB leaders say AI will be a game changer for their company.

Why is India leading? Cost discipline meets digital readiness. Indian SMBs aren’t experimenting with AI for novelty. They’re solving concrete problems: handling customer queries when the office closes, following up with leads whilst the team focuses on closings, creating marketing content without hiring agencies, and processing IT requests without full-time tech staff.

What Agentforce actually does for Indian SMBs

Traditional business software digitises workflows. Agentforce — the agentic AI layer built on Salesforce unified platform, removes execution bottlenecks by deploying autonomous AI agents that work alongside teams. Here’s how it works across four critical functions, proven by real Indian businesses:

Sales: From lead chaos to revenue pipeline. When TASC deployed Salesforce Agentforce to unify sales and marketing operations, the impact was transformative. Two autonomous AI agents—a lead-sourcing agent and an outreach agent—now capture, qualify, and nurture leads at scale. The lead sourcing agent generated over 2,000 actionable leads, whilst the engagement agent boosted email performance with a sixfold increase in response rates. Integrated with TASC’s ATS and ERP, the platform streamlined sales and operations end to end. Richard Jackson, Chief Transformation Officer at TASC Group, explains: “By embedding real-time insights and automation into our core processes, we are building a future-ready organisation that can scale quickly while delivering exceptional value to clients.”

Marketing: Content creation at scale. Salesforce data shows 51% of Indian SMBs use AI to optimise marketing campaigns, with 48% generating new content like emails and blog posts. For SMBs targeting bilingual audiences across Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities, this means creating English and Hindi variants in minutes instead of weeks. Marketing managers shift from content creation to strategy and performance analysis—whilst AI handles production.

Customer Service: Always-on support without night shifts. aha, the regional OTT platform with over 20 million downloads, faced surging support demand during their aha 2.0 refresh. Salesforce helped centralise leads, cases, and subscriptions, enabling a 360° view of each user. The transformation: approximately 60% of incoming queries resolved autonomously via chatbots, 5,000+ daily queries handled, and mean resolution times of just 2.5-5 minutes for chat and calls. aha’s VP of Product puts it simply: “To be a number one brand, you need to provide a stellar experience, and that’s what Salesforce enables us to do.”

IT Operations: Solving tech issues without hiring engineers. Salesforce research shows 54% of Indian SMBs use automated service chatbots, handling routine IT tickets — password resets, software access, system queries—autonomously. Complex issues escalate to humans with complete context. Lean IT teams focus on strategic projects instead of repetitive support.

These aren’t hypothetical. They’re proven outcomes from Indian businesses using Salesforce to scale operations without proportionally scaling costs.

How agentic AI is different from chatbots and automation

Many Indian SMBs have tried earlier technology waves. Chatbots that couldn’t understand regional English. Marketing automation requires engineers to configure. CRM software teams never adopted it because it added work instead of removing it.

Agentic AI is  fundamentally different. Traditional chatbots follow scripts. Agentic AI understands context, makes decisions, and takes actions. Traditional automation requires pre-programmed workflows. Agentic AI adapts based on outcomes.

Consider Jaipur Rugs, a leader in hand-woven rugs expanding from B2B exports into direct-to-consumer retail. Teams were overwhelmed with scattered data across spreadsheets, emails, and siloed systems. Salesforce helped integrate order capture from all channels, automate sales and service workflows, and give every team access to a single source of customer data.

The results speak volumes: 30% increase in lead-to-order conversion, 40% improvement in customer satisfaction, 30% boost in case handling productivity, and faster order processing. Yogesh Chaudhary, Director of Sales, explains: “By improving employee experiences through Salesforce, we’ve also improved customer experiences. Queries are answered quicker, order processing is smoother, and shipping timelines have reduced.”

The constraint that agentic AI removes isn’t just efficiency. It’s the gap between knowing what customers need and delivering it before they ask competitors.

Three ways Indian SMBs can start with Agentforce today

The beauty of Agentforce for Indian businesses is deployment speed. Unlike enterprise software requiring months of implementation, SMBs activate AI agents in days.

Start with sales qualification: Salesforce data shows 46% of Indian SMBs use AI for predictive sales forecasting. Agentforce qualifies inbound leads based on configurable criteria — company size, budget signals, response urgency—and schedules calls automatically. Hubilo’s 9× faster quotes prove the impact. Set it up in a week. Measure conversion rates.

Deploy customer service agents for FAQs: Identify the ten most common customer questions. Train Agentforce on answers from existing documentation. aha’s experience shows approximately 60% of queries can resolve autonomously, freeing humans for complex issues. Launch on website chat first, then expand to WhatsApp and email—where Indian customers actually communicate.

Automate marketing content creation: Instead of hiring agencies, use Agentforce to generate campaign copy, social posts, and email sequences. Provide brand guidelines once. The AI adapts content for different segments — B2B vs B2C, Tier 1 vs Tier 2 cities, English vs regional languages. The pattern: Start with high-volume, repeatable tasks overwhelming teams. Measure impact. Expand to adjacent functions.

What growing Indian SMBs are doing differently

Salesforce research reveals that 88% of growing SMBs invest more in technology compared to a year ago, versus 59% of stagnant peers and just 46% of declining businesses.

Salesforce data shows the top SMB priorities differ dramatically: growing SMBs prioritise improving customer experience, whilst stagnant and declining peers focus on acquiring new customers. This reveals the fundamental insight: acquisition means little if teams can’t serve customers well.

When evaluating technology, 45% of leaders at growing SMBs say AI capabilities are extremely important, versus only 23% at declining SMBs. The data backs this up. Growing SMBs describe their tech as an integrated suite (60%), compared to stagnant (55%) and declining peers (45%). This consolidation matters: separate research shows small business owners lose 1.5 hours daily to wasted time, with nearly a fifth attributing this to context switching between multiple applications.

For Indian businesses, this compounds faster because labour costs are rising whilst AI costs are dropping. A Mumbai-based SMB that previously needed three customer service reps can now serve the same volume with one rep and Agentforce handling routine queries.

The trust and data foundations that make agentic AI work

Here’s what doesn’t work: buying AI software and expecting magic. Indian SMBs succeeding with Agentforce share three foundations.

First, unified data accessible in one place: If customer information lives in WhatsApp chats, order details in Excel, and product info in the founder’s head, AI can’t help. Jaipur Rugs’ transformation shows the power of a single source of truth: faster order processing, better-organised store walk-ins, more personalised customer interactions. Salesforce research confirms 86% of Indian SMB leaders say improving data quality would increase revenue, with 92% believing it would improve productivity.

Second, integrated technology stacks: The average SMB uses seven different business applications, but 47% of Indian SMB leaders feel overwhelmed by too many business tools. Growing SMBs consolidate onto integrated platforms. Hubilo’s unified sales, CRM, service, and analytics on Salesforce eliminated the toggling tax. aha’s centralised leads, cases, and subscriptions enabled their 360° customer view.

Third, measurement that drives decisions: Growing Indian SMBs track specific AI impact: leads qualified, response times, content produced, tickets resolved. With 90% of Indian SMB leaders identifying complete and accurate data as increasingly important for business success, metrics aren’t vanity — they’re strategic.

Without these foundations, AI deployment becomes another abandoned software subscription. With them, it becomes the growth lever that scales teams without proportionally scaling costs.

Why Indian SMBs can’t wait to adopt AI

The competitive dynamic is clear. With 5.9 crore registered SMBs contributing 45% of India’s exports and employing more than 25 crore people, this growth creates opportunity. It also creates competition.

When one Delhi business deploys Agentforce to respond to leads in minutes whilst another takes hours, customers don’t wait. When a Bangalore firm produces marketing campaigns in a tenth of the time at a tenth of the cost, market share shifts. When a Mumbai business delivers 24/7 customer support whilst another operates 9-to-6, satisfaction scores diverge.The constraint isn’t whether to adopt AI. It’s how fast Indian SMBs can deploy it before the execution gap becomes insurmountable. Research shows 79% of Indian SMBs already invest in AI in some form, with over a third fully implementing it. The question for Indian business leaders isn’t whether AI matters. It’s whether their teams will be augmented or overwhelmed.

Back to Hubilo’s transformation. After deploying Salesforce to unify their fragmented systems, quotes that took days now generate 9× faster. Partner management streamlined. Sales productivity soared. They’re not working longer hours. Their team isn’t burned out. The constraint shifted from “Can we handle more customers?” to “How fast can we grow?”

That’s the Indian SMB opportunity. Not replacing people with robots. Augmenting lean teams to compete with better-funded players. Scaling revenue without proportionally scaling costs. Growing fast whilst maintaining quality.

Indian SMBs scale your business with AI — without the complexity

Indian small and medium businesses are at an inflection point. The execution gap between customer demand and team capacity is widening. The traditional answer—hire more people — no longer works given rising costs and talent scarcity.Agentforce removes that constraint. AI agents handle sales qualification, marketing creation, customer service, and IT operations whilst human teams focus on judgement calls and relationships. Indian SMBs using AI see measurable lift: 95% report more efficient operations, 97% improve productivity, 96% see revenue gains, and 97% enhance customer experience.