Indian companies are spending on AI like never before — and quietly distrusting it like never before, too. That's the strange double story in the second annual Data and AI Impact Report from SAS, built on IDC research insights, whose India findings were spotlighted this week. On one side: budgets going up almost everywhere. On the other: nearly everyone second-guessing what the AI tells them. Both things are true at once, and the gap between them is where Indian businesses will either win or waste money in 2027.
01.Indian AI budgets are climbing, fast
Let's start with the money, because it's moving. Among surveyed organisations in India, 91.8% expect AI spending to increase over the next 12 months. And it's not small bumps: the share planning a significant increase of more than 20% jumped from just 5% in 2025 to 27.3% in 2026. That's a real shift from "let's pilot something" to "let's build our quarter around this".
Noshin Kagalwalla, Vice President – Public Sector, APAC and Managing Director of SAS India, put it plainly: with over 90% of surveyed organisations planning to increase AI investments, establishing trust in AI systems will be critical to realising lasting business value. Financial services and technology firms in India are leading the maturity curve, with year-on-year improvements across most trust measures.
02.The trust gap: 97% of users override AI advice
Here's the thing nobody's talking about: 97.2% of users override AI-generated recommendations in at least some cases. And the number one reason isn't that the AI was wrong — it's that the AI couldn't explain why it decided what it did. Insufficient explanation behind recommendations and inadequate context were the most common triggers for humans simply ignoring the machine, regardless of whether the output was correct.
Trust also drops as autonomy rises: 76% of users trust generative AI, but only 66% trust agentic AI — the systems that act on their own. Which is ironic, because agents are exactly what everyone is racing to deploy. Every office worker who has quietly redone the AI's slide deck "just to be safe" already knows this finding personally.
03.Trustworthy AI pays — 15 times more likely to see ROI
The most commercially useful finding in the report: organisations applying trustworthy AI practices were 15 times more likely to report strong ROI from their AI projects — 62% versus roughly 4% for the laggards. Those with the strongest governance, data quality and auditability practices also reported at least double the ROI from deployments, and 1.85 times greater gains across thirteen business outcomes, from revenue growth to customer experience.
Chris Marshall, Vice President at IDC, frames it well: as AI becomes more autonomous, organisations face a new challenge — maintaining confidence in systems people don't fully understand. Stronger oversight, explainability and data foundations are becoming prerequisites for scaling AI, not optional extras. And the leaders aren't slowing down: 85% of them are increasing their trustworthy-AI investment by more than 10% this year, actively widening the gap over everyone else.
04.The weak link: India's data foundations
So where does the chain break? Data. For 69.4% of surveyed Indian organisations, data quality and governance emerged as one of the most important factors influencing AI reliability. Yet only 17.5% of enterprises globally have a fully optimised data infrastructure mature enough for the demands of agentic AI — and weak foundations directly hurt performance.
The report's numbers make the compounding effect clear: organisations with an optimised data foundation are four times more likely to expect strong ROI, and six times more likely to mandate the data quality and explainability controls that build trust in the first place. In other words, the boring work — clean data, clear governance, documented decisions — is what separates the companies getting returns from the ones getting screenshots for the annual report.
This tracks with what we've been seeing all year. We covered CEA's take on AI and the Indian economy earlier this week, and the theme was the same: adoption is racing ahead of readiness. We also wrote about how enterprises are actually putting GPT-6 Astra to work — and the ones succeeding are the ones that pair powerful models with disciplined processes, not just bigger budgets.
Related reads
- TRAI's new AI spam call rules — the other big trust problem Indian users face.
- MeitY's signal that AI rules are coming — where governance goes from here.
Key Takeaways
- 91.8% of Indian organisations are raising AI budgets; 27.3% plan increases above 20% (up from 5% in 2025)
- 97.2% of users override AI recommendations — usually because the AI can't explain its reasoning
- Trust drops from 76% for generative AI to 66% for agentic AI as autonomy increases
- Organisations with trustworthy AI practices are 15x more likely to report strong ROI (62% vs 4%)
- Data quality and governance is a top priority for 69.4%, but only 17.5% of enterprises have data infrastructure ready for agentic AI
Related Reads
- India's AI framework gets a technical secretariat in MeitY — how the government plans to act on exactly this trust gap
- India's AI problem: missing institutions, not guidelines — why experts say enforcement, not more policy papers, is the bottleneck
Frequently Asked Questions
What does the SAS-IDC report say about AI spending in India?
In the second annual Data and AI Impact Report from SAS, built on IDC research insights, 91.8% of surveyed Indian organisations expect AI spending to increase over the next 12 months. The share planning a significant increase of more than 20% jumped from just 5% in 2025 to 27.3% in 2026.
Why do Indian users override AI recommendations?
97.2% of users override AI-generated recommendations in at least some cases — and the top reason is not that the AI was wrong, but that it couldn't explain why it decided what it did. Insufficient explanation behind recommendations and inadequate context were the most common triggers. Trust also drops as autonomy rises: 76% of users trust generative AI, but only 66% trust agentic AI.
Does trustworthy AI actually pay off for businesses?
Yes. Organisations applying trustworthy AI practices were 15 times more likely to report strong ROI from their AI projects — 62% versus roughly 4% for the laggards. Those with the strongest governance, data quality and auditability practices also reported at least double the ROI from deployments and 1.85 times greater gains across thirteen business outcomes.
What This Means for You
If you work at an Indian company, read this as a career and money map. The budgets are coming — your employer will spend on AI whether or not anyone knows how to use it well. The people who get promoted will be the ones who can make AI output trustworthy and explainable to their teams, because that's the exact gap the report identifies. And if you're a founder or freelancer, note that "AI-powered" alone is no longer a differentiator; showing governance, explainability and real ROI is what wins enterprise clients now. The practical starting point is knowing these tools deeply enough to direct them well — which is what our GPT-6 Astra — Zero to Hero Guide is built for, especially the prompting, cost optimization and business ideas chapters that turn AI spend into actual returns.
And if GPT-6 Astra itself is still new to you, our GPT-6 Astra explainer is the best place to start — it covers what the model does, what it costs, and how to stay safe while using it.