36% of Indian enterprises started budgeting for Gen AI: E&Y report

New Delhi [India], January 28 (ANI): A survey conducted by multinational professional services firm Ernst & Young showed that 36 per cent of enterprises in India have budgeted and started investing in GenAI while another 24 per cent are experimenting with it.

Over the past few years, innovation in Generative AI (GenAI) has progressed at an extraordinary pace, the world over, including in India.

In the survey report titled ‘How much productivity can GenAI unlock in India? The AIdea of India: 2025’, E&Y asserted that technology sector clients have been leading the way with life sciences and financial services following suit.

At the same time, business value delivered is relatively low with only 15 per cent of Indian enterprises reported having GenAI workloads in production, and just 8 per cent being able to fully measure and allocate AI costs.

The outcome was of the survey was not surprising, E&Y said in the report.

“Packaging innovation into products and services that enterprises can use is a time-consuming process. Enterprises need clarity on ROI (return on investments) and guarantees around (various) issues…as they craft their digital transformation roadmaps,” the survey report read.

However, rapid advancements so far have already made AI ‘good enough’ for scaling across many use cases, it said.

The E&Y survey of Indian enterprises suggests that customer service, operations and sales and marketing functions are already leading the way in AI adoption.

“Over the next few years, as these teething issues are addressed, AI and GenAI models (will) make their way into the enterprise mainstream across all functions and departments,” the survey report argued.

AI-powered chat, voice and regional language tools are already making an impact and this trend will accelerate going ahead.

Further, they said that the rapid integration of AI Agents into sectors like information technology, finance, customer service and healthcare will reshape traditional ways of working. It will though present both opportunities and challenges for Indian professionals.

Coming to the cost side of AI adoption, E&Y said the cost of using AI models has already plummeted, making them increasingly accessible to enterprises.

Going ahead, a rich Indic AI ecosystem will also evolve to cater to unique Indian needs, it asserted.

There has already been a mushrooming of Indic LLMs (large language models) that leverage open-source models fine-tuned with Indian language datasets.

A key initiative in this space, according to E&Y, is Bhashini — a government-led AI project aimed at creating an open-source Indic language dataset to expand internet and digital service accessibility in Indian languages.

Overall, E&Y is of the view that GenAI has the potential to drive productivity gains, impacting millions of workers and redefining the future of work.