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Nearly seven in 10 Indian businesses or 69 per cent plan to increase artificial intelligence (AI) spending over the next 12 months, but a lack of AI-ready enterprise data remains a significant barrier to scaling deployments and achieving stronger returns, a report said on Monday. 

The report from Dun & Bradstreet said that only 3 per cent of surveyed Indian businesses described their enterprise data as fully ready to support AI at scale, compared with 8 per cent globally.

Another 42 per cent described their data as mostly ready and 44 per cent as partially ready, the report noted.

Closing this data-readiness gap is essential for Indian businesses seeking to scale AI and generate consistent returns, as AI investment and implementations accelerate.

Nearly 70 per cent Indian firms believe AI will contribute to new products, services, business models or operational improvements in the next quarter. More than 60 per cent of respondents have moved beyond the planning stage, with 35 per cent scaling pilot projects into production and 26 per cent reporting that AI is embedded across multiple core business processes.

“India has reached an exciting inflection point in its AI journey. The ambition is clearly visible, and businesses are increasingly seeing tangible returns from their AI investments,” said Julian Prower, Executive Vice President, Global Business Operations & Transformation and Managing Director & CEO, India & Taiwan, Dun & Bradstreet.

“The next chapter will be about moving from AI adoption to AI advantage. As enterprises embed AI more deeply across operations and decision-making, the quality of the underlying foundation will determine the quality of the outcomes,” Prower added.

The report highlighted a strong link between data readiness and returns from AI investments. Businesses with fully AI-ready data were 6.3 times more likely to report broad or strong returns on investment than companies whose data was only partially ready.