By: Himanshi Jain
Last updated : November 19, 2025 3:31 pm
In an exclusive conversation with Retail4Growth during the recently held RISE 2025 event, Koustubh Jalan, Sales Leader for Retail & Consumer Goods at Salesforce India, breaks down why agentic AI is becoming retail’s biggest transformation lever and opening doors to faster insights.
The retail world is turning hyper-dynamic with technology becoming the backbone of every brand’s growth story. As consumer expectations accelerate and purchase journeys get more fluid, brands are under pressure to move from piecemeal technology setups to fully connected ecosystems.
In an exclusive conversation at RAI’s Retail India Summit & Expo 2025, Koustubh Jalan, Sales Leader for Retail & Consumer Goods at Salesforce India, unpacked the core technology challenges facing Indian brands and what the future of retail-tech really looks like.
The problem: Retail runs on disconnected tech
Koustubh begins by calling out a reality that many leaders acknowledge privately but rarely articulate openly. Indian brands, he observes, have largely relied on makeshift technologies, solutions that were never originally designed for them, but adapted from someone else’s business model. He explains how tech stacks in India have grown layer by layer – a POS from one vendor, an OMS from another, a commerce solution from somewhere else, and an SFA tool borrowed from a different industry altogether. When these systems don’t talk to one another in real time, the entire chain, from distributors to sales teams to retail stores, struggles to stay in sync.
“When you try to give a connected experience to the customer, it becomes fragmented and broken. And the biggest issue is that information doesn’t flow in real time,” says Koustubh. For him, timing is the real gap. Most systems push updates after 10–15 minutes. “By that time, the customer is out of the store and the decision is made. You’ve already lost the moment,” he adds.
This, he believes, is one of the most pressing structural challenges retail brands face today.
Pic Courtesy: www.salesforce.com
The need for a real-time platform
According to Koustubh, brands are increasingly looking for technology that evolves with them instead of holding them back. He says, “Processes change every day. Regulations change. Practical challenges change. Your tech has to be flexible enough to change with you.”
Salesforce steps in as a low-code, enterprise-ready platform that lets brands pivot, scale, and adapt rapidly, without the need for months of heavy coding. What traditionally took half a year can now be executed in weeks.
From suggesting how many units of a product to push at a store, to giving sales reps a ready-made pitch based on customer history, the intelligence layer has started shaping real business impact.
The next frontier is agentic AI
While sharing his views on what lies ahead in the future, he shares, “We’ve moved from predictive to generative. Now the world is shifting to agentic AI, and agentic is here to stay.”
Unlike passive systems that wait for commands, agentic AI takes guided actions and enables real-time decision support for every layer of a retail organisation. “Whoever does agents best will lead the future. The players who build the strongest agents will keep pushing their solutions to new levels. The possibilities with agentic AI are endless,” emphasises Koustubh.
For retail, this means frontline autonomy, automated decision flows, and systems that not only think but act. It will reshape inventory planning, customer engagement, and on-ground execution in ways the industry is only beginning to imagine. The industry’s future belongs to brands that move away from siloed tools and invest in platforms built for scale, flexibility, and intelligence.