AI-powered innovation blueprint: Arundhati
Hyderabad: Budget 2026 represented India's transformation from technology consumption to AI-powered innovation—a blueprint for a $7 trillion economy built on intelligence, not just scale, said Arundhati Bhattacharya, President & CEO, Salesforce South Asia According to her, the strategic architecture is balanced and long-term. The tax holiday until 2047 for cloud services is a masterstroke in data sovereignty, attracting an estimated $50 billion in data center investments by 2030 while positioning India as the cloud hub for emerging markets.
MSME reforms demonstrate sophisticated thinking. The Rs10,000 crore SME Growth Fund, combined with the TReDs platform mandate and expanded safe harbor thresholds, creates force multipliers enabling India's 63 million MSMEs to scale from survivors to global champions, she said.
The High-Powered Committee on Education to Employment targets capturing 10 per cent of global services trade by 2047—ambitious but achievable given our demographic advantage: 65 per cent under 35, digital infrastructure like UPI and Aadhaar, she added.
"AI integration is refreshingly pragmatic.
