Indian enterprises are scaling AI faster and extracting more business value than their global peers, but this success is bringing a new kind of pressure: rapidly growing data infrastructure complexity and security risk. Hitachi Vantara’s 2025 State of Data Infrastructure Report shows that while three in four organisations report successful AI outcomes, nearly nine in ten say their data foundations are becoming harder to manage and secure.
India Outpaces the World on AI Adoption and ROI
The report, based on a global survey of business and IT leaders, finds that 89% of Indian organisations have either widely adopted AI or made it critical to their operations, compared with 69% globally. Nearly two-thirds rate themselves as strong or established in achieving ROI from AI, indicating that most have moved beyond pilots into production-scale deployment. Around 75% of enterprises in India report successful AI outcomes, with virtually no respondents citing outright failures.
The primary use cases include workflow automation, insight generation, and improving productivity and decision-making, supported by high-quality data, strong monitoring, employee adoption and skilled teams.
Data Growth and Hybrid Environments Drive Operational Strain
Beneath this momentum lies a sharp rise in infrastructure pressure. Eighty-seven percent of Indian organisations say their data infrastructure complexity is increasing rapidly or faster, above the global average. AI investment in India is expected to grow by more than 75% over the next two years, with data storage requirements projected to rise by nearly 74%.
Four in ten organisations now manage between 50 and 200 petabytes of data, a scale at which even minor inefficiencies or misconfigurations can cause significant operational strain. Much of this expansion is happening across hybrid and multi‑cloud environments: a large share of operational and business data now sits in public clouds, increasing the challenge of governance, visibility and control as AI workloads expand.
Security and Governance Move to the Forefront
As AI initiatives scale, data security has become the dominant concern. Two‑thirds of Indian organisations see security as a top challenge in AI implementation. In response, they are putting in place stronger governance frameworks and leadership alignment than many of their global counterparts.
A large majority report clearly defined executive AI visions, dedicated AI or ML teams, and formal KPIs and business outcomes for AI initiatives. Indian enterprises also rate themselves higher on MLOps maturity, governance models and AI performance monitoring, and over half already embed sustainability considerations in their infrastructure strategies. These measures are helping ensure that AI growth does not come at the cost of resilience or regulatory exposure.
A Widening Readiness Gap in Data Foundations
Despite strong adoption and leadership focus, the report highlights a clear readiness divide. While 55% of Indian organisations have reached managed or optimised stages of data infrastructure maturity, the remaining 45% still operate on less mature foundations, making AI initiatives more resource-intensive and harder to scale reliably.
Only about a third currently have predictive, automated, and cost‑efficient infrastructure scaling in place, limiting their ability to sustain AI ROI as data volumes and workloads grow. This gap is increasingly becoming the bottleneck: the challenge is no longer building better models, but ensuring that the underlying data backbone can keep up.
Talent Shortages and Partner Reliance Shape the Road Ahead
Talent availability is emerging as one of the most significant constraints on AI growth. More than half of Indian organisations cite hiring skilled workers as a top challenge in AI implementation. To bridge this gap, nearly three‑quarters are working with external partners or outsourcing key aspects of their AI and data initiatives, a higher rate than the global average.
The report concludes that enterprises which invest early in automation, governance and data quality—while leveraging strategic partnerships—will be best positioned to sustain their AI momentum. With strong leadership commitment and an aggressive focus on modernising data foundations, India is well placed to maintain its edge in the global AI race, provided it can close the infrastructure and talent gaps that are now coming into sharper focus.
