Must shift AI from adoption to transformation: Deloitte says Indian firms lag behind global peers in expertise

Deloitte’s latest ‘State of AI in the Enterprise’ survey for 2026 captured insights showing that today's business leaders “face an unprecedented challenge: moving beyond pilots to truly integrating AI into the heart of their organizations”.

The report noted that corporates need to implement a “deliberate shift” that include redesigning of core processes and operating models with artificial intelligence, while “ensuring that human strengths — such as judgment, creativity, empathy, and relationship building — are elevated, not automated”.

For India in particular, the study noted that a majority of the organisations expect their AI budgets and productivity from the tech to increase over the next year. But Indian companies lag behind global companies when it comes to expertise.

The report was based on a survey of 3,235 director to C-suite-level respondents from six industries (consumer; energy, resources and industrials; financial services; life sciences and health care; technology, media and telecom; and government and public services) and 24 countries between August and September 2025. It also includes additional insights from 15 interviews with global C-suite executives and AI and data science leaders at large organisations across industries. For India, responses were captured from over 200 business and technology leaders

What is the status of Indian companies?

Indian enterprises are outpacing global counterparts in terms of AI adoption, but there is a significant capability gap, with lower levels of specialist expertise, the 'State of AI in the Enterprise' report for 2026 revealed, PTI reported.

“40% of Indian respondents report significant or full usage, compared with a global average of approximately 28%, indicating that Indian organisations are not only piloting AI, but are increasingly operationalising it to unlock near-term productivity and business outcomes,” it added.

• 94% of Indian organisations expect their AI budgets to increase over the next year.
• But 0-4% of Indian companies possess a high level of AI expertise, lagging behind the global average of 2-8%.
• The report lists regulatory and compliance demands as the leading obstacle for AI integration (39%), followed by resistance to change (34%).
• Organisations report relatively lower pressure from cost (12%) and infrastructure (5%) constraints, indicating that governance readiness and operating-model change are the more immediate limiting factors for scale.
• Nearly all respondents — 97% — anticipate productivity improvements.

“The next chapter will be shaped less by access to technology and more by the ability to build institutional capability, strengthen governance, and align people with new ways of working. Organisations that invest in trust and skills today will be better positioned to convert early gains into sustained advantage,” S Anjani Kumar, Partner, Deloitte India told the agency.

Fewer organisations focus on transformation: Deloitte

According to the Deloitte report, there is a divide between organisations looking to widen workforce access to AI tools and make early productivity gains, and those experimenting to create “true enterprise transformation”.

Deloitte also reported three key AI trends that are “reshaping” the AI space:

• Sovereign AI (technological autonomy for nations and organisations alike),
• Agentic AI (enabling autonomous reasoning and action raising need for governance), and
• Physical AI (merging digital and material worlds, making safety and human oversight critical).

The survey further showed companies have broadened worker access to AI by 50% in just one year—growing from fewer than 40% to around 60% of workers now equipped with sanctioned AI tools. However, while AI is boosting productivity and efficiency; just a subset are using it to rewrite the business.

• 34% of companies are starting to use AI to deeply transform their businesses,
• 30% are redesigning key processes around AI and
• The remaining 37% are only using AI at a surface level with little or no change to underlying business processes.
• Despite high expectations for automation, 84% of companies have not redesigned jobs or the nature of work itself around AI capabilities.

“While each are capturing productivity and efficiency gains, just the first group are truly reimagining their businesses rather than optimising what already exists,” it noted.

Challenges: AI oversight lagging, human role and worries

According to the research, use of autonomous AI agents has risen among companies, but oversight is lagging. “Nearly 3 in 4 (74%) companies plan to deploy agentic AI within two years. Yet, 1 in 5 (21%) report having a mature model for governance of autonomous agents, raising the specter of unintended risks," it pointed out.

Further, it also noted that AI doesn't need to eliminate the value of human contribution in organisations, and may “increase the need for uniquely human strengths, such as adaptivity and judgment, in the near term”.

A former telco VP explained: “We thought we were going to automate jobs. The truth is, you’re not. You’re going to give existing workers force multipliers where they can be more effective. Maybe someday these things will start to become headless where they just feed off a dashboard metric and you can pull back staff to wait on an alert that wakes somebody up or flashes red on the screen if something really bad happens. But initially it is going to be more work for those people. They’re not going to be cooling their heels; they’re going to be watching these agents, making sure the volume metrics are right, making sure the qualitative metrics are right, and being there to interact with them if they hit a human-in-the loop gate and need to interact with a human for accountability purposes.”

Overall, companies surveyed had broad worries: Data privacy and security tops the list at 73%, followed by legal, intellectual property, and regulatory compliance (50%), governance capabilities and oversight (46%), and model quality, consistency, and explainability (46%), as per the report

Tapping into AI's full potential: 6 focus areas

• Close the gap between access and activation: Most organisations have deployed AI tools, but far fewer have achieved meaningful usage. The gap between availability and adoption is now the primary barrier to value. Successful companies focus on activation, not just access, as per Deloitte.
• Unlock human advantage by redesigning work around AI: It added that the most successful organisations reimagine jobs to seamlessly combine human strengths and AI capabilities. “Organisations should take an AI-native approach and redesign work holistically rather than layering AI onto legacy processes,” as per the study.

• Build governance before you scale and make it everyone’s role: Deloitte believes that embedding oversight into performance rubrics will create shared responsibility that empowers employees to help identify challenges and guide safe, trusted AI use. For this: Organisations need to define where humans should remain in control; and cross-functional teams should establish governance frameworks early so that scale does not outpace control. It also cautioned that there should be calibrated balance between risk management and innovation. “The objective is not to add bureaucracy but to create clear, adaptive guardrails that allow responsible progress at speed,” it noted.
• Address sovereign AI requirements with focus and discipline: Leading companies take a focused approach: assessing which data and workloads must remain within national or regional boundaries, determining where local model hosting is mandatory, and clarifying how transparency, auditability, and documentation standards differ across markets. Sovereign AI readiness is now a core element of enterprise resilience and global competitiveness, not a specialised compliance task, it added.
• Build a “living” technology and data infrastructure for tomorrow’s AI: As per the report, an organization-wide, real-time system that adapts dynamically to business and regulatory change, will elevate AI infrastructure from IT initiative to strategic capability.
• Pursue strategic reinvention, not incremental efficiency: It noted that what companies are separated basis treatment of AI as core to strategy vs as a cost-saving tool. “The challenge now is activation: bridging the gap from tool access to meaningful adoption, moving beyond experimentation to operationalizing AI at scale, embedding AI into core business processes,” it added.

State of AI in the Enterprise — Key Highlights

• AI is moving from the pilot and experimentation phase to enterprise scaling as worker access to AI expands.

• AI transformation reveals productivity for most, business reimagination for a few as companies are focused on building AI fluency instead of redesigning work around AI.
• 77% of surveyed companies say the location of AI development is a key factor when choosing new technologies.
• AI agents are scaling faster than the guardrails.
• Physical AI is already embedded in operations—and its footprint is growing fast and 74% or nearly 3 in 4 companies plan to deploy agentic AI within two years.
• 36% of surveyed companies expect at least 10% of their jobs to be fully automated within a year.
• 84% of surveyed companies have not redesigned jobs around AI capabilities.
• 77% of surveyed companies now factor an AI solution’s country of origin into their vendor selection decisions.
• 21% of companies report currently having a mature model for governance of autonomous agents.