By DebDeep Sengupta, Area Vice President, South Asia, UiPath
India operates within a highly regulated environment. Businesses navigate more than 69,000 compliance requirements across central, state, and local laws, creating significant operational complexity across sectors. In FY25, the RBI issued 353 penalties amounting to ₹54.78 crore for non-compliance across regulated entities.
Under India’s new data protection regime, compliance can no longer sit outside operations as a periodic control. It must be integrated into daily workflows, especially in sectors like BFSI, healthcare, and real estate, where documentation requirements are intensive, and customer interactions generate large volumes of sensitive data.
Yet, many organisations still rely on manual work to interpret rules, check outputs, and correct errors. This makes compliance reactive and slow and puts enormous pressure on teams that are already stretched thin. AI helps by automating repetitive, rules-based tasks, handling large volumes of work more reliably, and freeing teams to focus on higher-value activities.
The Limits of Traditional Automation
Traditional automation, however, struggles when compliance requires judgment, understanding context, or adapting to fast-changing rules. As workflows become more dynamic and data-driven, organisations need systems that can work independently while still following rules and maintaining accountability.
Compliance Is Moving Inside the Workflow
Agentic AI changes this by shifting compliance from a human-led review function to a system-led enforcement model where compliance rules are enforced automatically within the workflow itself. With built-in policies, inline checks, automated validations, and audit trails, it’s able to prevent issues long before they even occur.
This evolution builds on the automation journeys some organisations have already started. RPA first helped automate repetitive, rules-based tasks. Agentic AI then added the ability to process unstructured data and support more complex decisions. Agentic AI brings these capabilities together, orchestrating automation and AI to manage end-to-end workflows with built-in governance. The result is systems that can act, adapt, and remain accountable across business processes.
Shriram Properties, a leading real estate developer in India, provides a clear example of why embedding compliance into workflows matters. As part of its digital transformation, the company automated complex processes across finance, HR, and supply chain. The impact was clear: manual SAP entry dropped by 70%, data accuracy reached 99% and over a thousand days of effort were reclaimed annually.
The Non-Obvious Advantage: Lower Variance
Much of the discussion around agentic AI focuses on autonomy and speed. The more practical advantage for Indian enterprises is its ability to reduce variance. Variance is what makes compliance difficult and quality unpredictable. It appears in manual data entry, in how teams interpret rules, in the judgement calls made under pressure, and in the inconsistent documentation that follows.
Agentic AI minimises this variance by applying rules consistently, never skipping steps, and producing audit-ready output automatically. Teams can rely on workflows to be accurate and reliable, even under pressure.
A New Trust Architecture for India
India’s compliance demands will only increase as digital public infrastructure expands and the data protection regime matures. Globally too, governance is becoming central to AI adoption: the AI governance market is projected to surge from USD 227 million today to USD 4.8 billion by 2034, signalling a future where oversight becomes inseparable from innovation.
The question for CXOs is no longer whether AI can speed up work, but whether it can make work safer, clearer, and more reliable. Agentic AI delivers exactly that. It helps enterprises grow while strengthening the trust that regulators, customers, and partners need. In India’s compliance-heavy markets, this ability to embed trust into everyday operations is quickly becoming a key competitive advantage.