A new market report, The AI Privacy Equation: India Market Report, finds that around 93% of Indian organisations use artificial intelligence in some form and that 71% strengthened privacy measures following AI adoption. The study was conducted by Arion Research LLC and Zoho.
The report highlights a strong focus on governance and ethics within Indian enterprises. It finds that 61% of surveyed organisations have established an AI ethics committee, while 92% report having a dedicated privacy team or officer. The study also notes that roughly 65% of organisations allocate more than 20% of their IT budget to privacy-related protections.
Key areas of privacy concern cited by respondents include cloud storage of customer data, collection and retention of biometric data, and the use of customer interactions to train AI models. The report says organisations are adopting measures such as data minimisation, guardrails and ethics reviews as part of engineering workflows to mitigate these risks.
The study also found substantial levels of AI integration across business functions: 47% of respondents use AI in software development and coding, 41% in customer service, 37% in product development and 32% for decision support. At the same time, organisations reported persistent obstacles to AI rollout, including poor data quality and availability (44%), regulatory compliance (39%) and lack of technical expertise (38%); 41% cited ongoing privacy and security concerns.
On workforce readiness, the report identifies priority upskilling areas: basic AI literacy (56%), data analysis (50%), prompt engineering (43%) and machine learning/model development (43%). The authors recommend bolstering in-house technical capability to convert experimental AI use into sustained, enterprise-grade deployments.
Commenting on the findings, Ramprakash Ramamoorthy, Director of AI Research at Zoho, highlighted that many organisations were embedding privacy into engineering practices rather than treating it as a compliance afterthought. Michael Fauscette, CEO and Chief Analyst at Arion Research LLC, said the results indicate that robust data governance can accelerate, not impede, AI adoption. Both comments were reported in the study coverage.