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The use of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) has been growing dramatically over the last few years, making it imperative for India Inc. to catch up, a report said.

About 59% of Indian enterprises are already actively deploying AI for organisational use cases, making the country rank among the top surveyed countries to do so, a report titled ‘AI Adoption Index 2023’ by intelligence firm Morning Consult and commissioned by IBM noted.

Nearly 6 out of 10 information technology (IT) professionals at enterprises reported that their company is actively implementing generative AI while 74% of them accelerated investments in or rollout of AI in the past 24 months in areas, including R&D, reskilling and workforce development, and building proprietary AI solutions.

The report’s findings are based on a survey conducted with 1,000 Indian technology employees.

The rise of easy-to-use AI tools and the need to reduce costs by automating key processes are top factors driving the adoption of AI, it noted.

To address labour or skills shortages, companies are tapping AI to do things like reduce manual or repetitive tasks with automation tools, automate customer self-service answers and actions, or improve recruiting and human resources, the report added.

Nearly 46% of companies are currently training or reskilling employees to work together with new automation and AI tools, and 51% said that employees at their organisations are excited to work with new AI and automation tools.

However, ethics and limited skill sets remain top concerns hindering further adoption of the technology. According to the survey, nearly 30% of employees said they have limited AI skills and expertise while 27% believed that AI projects are too complex or difficult to integrate and scale.

“The increase in AI adoption and investments by Indian enterprises is a good indicator that they are already experiencing the benefits from AI. However, there is still a significant opportunity to accelerate as many businesses are hesitant to move beyond experimentation and deploy AI at scale,” Sandip Patel, Managing Director, IBM India and South Asia, said.

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A quarter of the respondents found AI to involve “too much data complexity”, the report released on Thursday noted.

The majority of surveyed individuals emphasised the importance of presenting transparent and ethical AI practices along with the ability to explain how the technology arrived at a business decision.

However, despite understanding its importance, only a minority are taking key steps towards trustworthy AI like reducing bias, tracking data provenance, making sure they can explain the decisions of their AI models, or developing ethical AI policies, according to the report.

The top barriers to developing trustworthy and ethical AI are the lack of an AI strategy, company guidelines, and AI governance, among others, as per IBM’s report.

“To harness its full potential in the coming months, data and AI governance tools are going to be critical for building AI models responsibly that enterprises can trust and confidently adopt. Without the use of governance tools, AI can expose companies to data privacy issues, legal complications, and ethical dilemmas – cases of which we have already seen plaguing many across the world,” Patel added.