Salesforce to add 5.48 lakh direct jobs in India

California-based IT company Salesforce plans to add 5.48 lakh direct jobs in India in near future and sees the country has potential to become the second largest in terms of GDP, a top official of the company said on Friday.

Salesforce chief data evangelist Vala Afshar while speaking at the Raise summit said that indirectly the company will create 13 lakh jobs in India.

“I think the impact of my company in India alone is going to create billions of dollars in incremental GDP. We are going to create 1.3 million new jobs indirectly with our customer and partner ecosystem but directly we are going to add 548,000 new jobs in the near future,” Afshar said.

Salesforce is estimated to have a market capitalization of around USD 240 billion. ”In the next couple of years, we are committed to training 250,000 students. Education is key to reducing the digital divide,” Afshar said at the summit.

More than 79,000 stakeholders from academia, the research industry and government representatives from 147 countries participated in the summit that held during October 5-9, according to the Ministry of Electronics and Information technology. Afshar said that India will soon be the world’s most advanced connected society.

He said that data is going to be key to the artificial intelligence economy which is the reason that India is poised to be a superpower when it comes to AI. He said India has 60 crore unique users connected to the internet and has an opportunity in the next 5-6 years in the world to be USD 6 trillion consumers spend power in India.

“Every 3 seconds a new person in India connects to the internet for the first time. What that means 600 million today will be over a billion unique users connected to the internet in perhaps just in the next five years. This also means that India is poised to be the second-largest GDP in the world only behind China and ahead of the US,” Afshar said.

He said that the power of India is the fact that 80 percent of the population will be under the age of 44, and it will be the most advanced connected society in the world. ”One-sixth of humanity is in India. Data will fuel AI hub vision that you have in terms of expanding to the world,” Afshar said. CNBCTV18