A new Lenovo study reveals that Indian enterprises are set to lead the Asia-Pacific region in Artificial Intelligence (AI) investment growth, driven by a strong talent pool and a focus on ROI.
Key Points
- Indian organisations are planning to increase AI investments by 19%, the highest budget growth in the Asia-Pacific region, according to a Lenovo study.
- Lenovo highlights India's strong AI talent pool and its potential for creating AI applications, driving significant growth in the sector.
- The study indicates that 90% of Indian organisations favour hybrid AI architectures, balancing on-premise and edge environments for optimal performance and security.
- CIOs in India are focused on achieving faster ROI from AI investments, despite challenges related to legacy infrastructure.
- AI inferencing costs are a significant factor, with 75% of AI compute expected to be dedicated to inferencing, and a growing reliance on distributed edge infrastructure.
Enterprises across Asia Pacific are accelerating their shift from AI experimentation to execution, with 99 per cent of Indian organisations planning to increase investments in AI compared to 96 per cent in the region, a study by PC maker Lenovo said on Thursday.
While enterprises in Asia Pacific are looking to increase average AI investment by 15 per cent, India enterprises have the highest budget growth in the region with 19 per cent higher spending plans on average.
"There is a lot of expectation from India given the AI talent pool available here. A lot will get created in India in the AI application layer. India is talking about a 19 per cent growth in budget. I would say it is fairly well placed within the markets in terms of AI adoption," Lenovo India Vice-President and Managing Director Shailendra Katyal said.
He said that a lot of AI power is in the hands of consumers through devices where it will make the biggest difference.
"India is also the home to a lot of global technology providers, GSIs as we often call them. Everyone is developing a lot more agents which can use the computer power and which can build on the last training models which were created a few years ago. From training to inferencing to real magic happening in terms of real use cases," Katyal said.
He said that the agent for marketing may be different for finance, maybe different for legal.
CIO Perspectives on AI Investment
"We do expect this explosion to continue and obviously when we look at Indian CIOs (chief information officers), tend to be a little more frugal. The demand on ROI (return on investments) and expectation on payback is a little faster. That's what we are seeing in the sentiment of the CIOs," Katyal said.
He said that CIOs are facing some challenges in terms of legacy infrastructure and adoption may take more than a year, but in parallel there's also pressure to deliver faster ROI and business outcomes on the investments being made.
Hybrid AI Architectures and Edge Computing
According to the report, 90 per cent of organisations in India prefer hybrid AI architectures, combining on-premise and edge environments to balance performance, security, and regulatory requirements.
Lenovo, President for Asia Pacific, ISG, Sumir Bhatia said 96 per cent of organizations across AP are planning a 15 per cent on average increase in AI investment which shows thatAI decisions are now being made at the core of enterprise strategy.
He said AI inferencing costs can be up to 15 times higher than training. According to the report, 75 per cent of AI compute will be dedicated to inferencing, with 80 per cent of enterprises relying on distributed edge infrastructure by 2030.
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