Zeta announced the findings of its 2026 CXO survey on AI adoption in Indian banking, based on responses from 40 CXOs across 18 banks and non-banking financial companies (NBFCs).
According to the survey, 70% of chief digital officer respondents said their institutions were at either selective or scaled AI deployment, including 30% reporting scaled deployment. AI adoption was most prevalent in customer service, fraud and risk analytics, document processing and software testing.
The survey found that security and data privacy were the leading barriers to further AI adoption, with technology and risk leaders citing these concerns as institutions expand beyond bounded and reviewable use cases.
Most institutions surveyed allocate less than 10% of new-project technology spending to AI. The survey also found that four in 10 digital leaders could not identify a high-ROI AI use case within their institution.
“Indian banks have shown that AI creates value in production. The next challenge is making that success repeatable, and the survey is clear about what stands in the way: not conviction, but control,” said Sivaram Kowta, President, Zeta India. “Banks have connected their core systems. The next step is to make them usable by AI, with banking context and permissions built in, and to put in place the identity, policy and audit controls that let risk and security leaders say yes with confidence. Banks that build these foundations once will find that the tenth deployment costs a fraction of the first.”