Sankaranarayanan Raghavan, Chief Technology and Digital Officer, Rushabh Gandhi, Managing Director & CEO, IndiaFirst Life Insurance, Arundhati Battacharya, President and CEO, Salesforce South Asia, Arun Kumar Parameswaran, EVP & MD, Salesforce South Asia, (L to R)
IndiaFirst Life Insurance has deepened its partnership with Salesforce to deploy AI agents across underwriting, customer service, and claims processing, the company announced today.The Bank of Baroda subsidiary will embed Salesforce’s Agentforce platform into three core business areas. For new business underwriting, AI agents will review KYC, financial and medical documents, flag discrepancies, assess risk, and recommend decisions. In customer service, agents will classify cases, assess sentiment, and generate responses. For micro-insurance and PMJJBY claims, agents will verify documents, identify missing information, and route exceptions for human review.The move builds on a Salesforce deployment already covering sales, CRM, business process management, and claims, all implemented within 24 months. IndiaFirst Life’s proprietary sales app, UNIFY, is connected to Salesforce in real time via MuleSoft.The company shared early operational metrics from its existing Salesforce rollout: straight-through processing rates rose 10 per cent, M0 conversion improved 15 per cent, supervisor productivity grew 15 per cent, product rollout time fell 40 per cent, and login-to-issuance turnaround dropped 50 per cent. NPS is at an all-time high, according to Managing Director and CEO Rushabh Gandhi.Gandhi said technology at IndiaFirst Life is “not a support function” but a strategic differentiator, a position the company has held since its founding in 2009. He described 2026 as the company’s “year of the agentic.” On cost pressures, Gandhi said the increased investment in agentic AI would be cross-subsidised from other businesses and would not push overall cost ratios higher.Arundhati Bhattacharya, President and CEO of Salesforce South Asia, addressed the recurring question on AI and jobs directly, citing Salesforce’s own experience: “...61 per cent of all cases coming into Salesforce is answered by independent autonomous agents. That number was 5 per cent twelve months back...” She said the remaining case load is now handled by employees focused on more complex problems.On ROI, a consistent theme in boardroom discussions, Gandhi cautioned against a purely financial view. “...ROI is getting overhyped... it’s a much, much bigger thing than ROI,” he said, pointing to customer experience, grievance reduction, and long-term scalability as equally important metrics.IndiaFirst Life, which serves customers across more than 90 per cent of India’s pin codes, said it has no plans to scale back its human agent network despite the expanded AI deployment.Published on August 27, 2026
