Arundhati Bhattacharya, Chairperson and CEO of Salesforce India said the company will significantly increase its headcount in the country by next year; the company currently employs over 7500 currently in India. By January 2023-end, the US-based tech company wants to ramp up its India employee strength to above 10,000, Bhattacharya told PTI.

She elaborated that the company will prioritise banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI), manufacturing, services and social service sectors, in that order, in India.

“We are (Salesforce India’s headcount) at about 7,500 plus. We are expecting that we will end FY23, which for us ends in in January of 2023… we expect to be in the range of 10,000,” she told PTI in an interview.

The cloud-based services provider currently has offices in six Indian cities: Mumbai, Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Pune, Gurugram and Jaipur.

The company hired over 2,500 more employees during the pandemic in April 2020 in India.

On flexible and hybrid work culture, Bhattacharya said she expects more workers to return to offices, adding, that sense of collaboration and belonging to an organisation increases when employees work in close proximity.

“We will see more and more workforce returning to the workplaces,” the Salesforce India CEO added.

“Because what we are also seeing is that if you don’t get them to come to the office and connect, then it becomes more and more difficult to create the DNA of an organisation,” she explained.

Bhattacharya, who helmed India’s biggest bank State Bank of India prior to joining Salesforce, added that hybridisation is important but many families in India live in a multi-generational setup which makes it difficult for some workers to work from home.