Indian Market More Mature When It Comes To Leveraging AI: Report

New report on Thursday revealed that India as market was more mature than the US and UK when it came to leveraging artificial intelligence (AI).

In the Decision Intelligence maturity scale, India scored 64 (out of 100) while the US posted a score of 52 and the UK just 44.

Decision Intelligence (DI) is the application of AI to commercial decision-making. Because it can offer benefits across an organisation and is not limited to one department or operation, it is how most businesses will adopt the technology. Today, AI adoption is being viewed as extremely important.

The research found a number of factors contributing to India scoring relatively higher that its much-developed counterparts. One of the main reasons among them were data literacy – which is higher in Indian businesses. 

The report found that junior employees (those from middle management and down) are far more likely to rely on data than counterparts in the US and UK, with 98 per cent of Indian junior staff saying they had performed data analysis at least once in their current roles, compared to 81 per cent in the US and 64 per cent in the UK.

Speaking to BW Businessworld, Richard Potter, CEO and co-founder at PEAK said, “We see that junior employees in Indian businesses are much more open to and are positive about AI in their business. They are much more aware of whether the business is adopting these technologies and trying to change the way it runs itself with these technologies.”

The report further threw light on how businesses structure data teams and how critical that choice is to successful AI adoption. Higher maturity Indian businesses take a different path to peers in the US and UK and tend to favour a decentralised approach, with the majority (33 per cent) of Indian businesses embedding data practitioners in commercial teams to support with analysis – by contrast most US (30 per cent) and UK (25 per cent) businesses have a central data team. Indian businesses are also most likely to temporarily substitute a data expert into a team when needed, with 20% of staff in India having experienced this, compared to 13 per cent in US and 14 per cent in UK.

“Indian organisations are often putting the resources into business teams and functions to allow them along the AI journey. Whereas, we often see centralised approaches in UK and US businesses, which means everything has to go through like a central function – which can either slow down adoption or potentially cause friction between the sort of business teams and the central teams”, explained Potter.

Recently, India overtook the UK to become the fifth largest economy in the world. Meanwhile, the US and UK have lost ground in the global AI race too at a time when Western countries are facing increasing geopolitical uncertainty.

Peak’s Decision Intelligence Maturity Index revealed that Indian businesses are better at communicating their AI plans, only 2 per cent of Indian workers weren’t sure if their business used AI, compared to 21 per cent in the UK and 18 per cent in the US. The result of this and the higher data literacy seen among Indian workers is a fuller understanding of what can be achieved with AI, which translates into broader support for the technology among end users.