Organisations in India are set to ramp up their investments in artificial intelligence, with AI spending expected to grow 2.7 times in 2025, of overall IT spends, according to the Lenovo-IDC CIO Playbook 2025 survey.
At the forefront of this surge is generative AI, which is projected to command 43% of overall AI implementation spends next year, the report reveals.
In terms of function-wise adoption, sales takes the lead in GenAI deployments across Indian enterprises. Marketing follows closely as the second most active area, while software development ranks third, highlighting the growing role of AI in both customer-facing and backend functions.
The reason Indian organisations, particularly those in BFSI (Business, Financial Services, and Insurance), Retail, Manufacturing and healthcare, are focusing on streamlining back-end operations when investing in GenAI is because these are directional to their low-hanging and short-term outcomes and fruits. “It’s IT operations and those areas that they look at low-hanging fruit where they want to go. They’re looking at certain IT OPS. It could be in HR, sales, bringing in efficiency. There are some organisations that are actually going into loss prevention,” Sumir Bhatia, President, Asia Pacific Infrastructure Solutions Group, Lenovo, told Fortune India.