This is what AI is changing for enterprises

India’s technology industry has never been defined by a single breakthrough. Its success has come from continuously reinventing itself, from becoming the world’s technology services hub to emerging as one of the world’s leading innovation ecosystems. Today, we stand at another inflection point, one where AI has the potential to fundamentally reshape how enterprises operate.

The Value of AI report by SAP and Oxford Economics reflects this shift. AI already supports 33% of business tasks in Indian organisations today, compared to 23% a year ago. Within the next two years, businesses expect AI to support more than half of all tasks. Organisations also plan to increase AI investments by 45%, while expected returns are projected to grow from 22% today to 39%. These numbers reflect growing confidence in AI’s potential. Yet one finding deserves particular attention. While 85% of Indian businesses believe agentic AI has the potential to transform their organisations, only 3% say they are fully prepared for it today.

To me, the gap between ambition and readiness captures the real opportunity before us. The next phase of AI will depend not only on advances in technology, but on how effectively enterprises connect AI with trusted data, business processes, governance and people.

The next AI challenge is not adoption. It is enterprise transformation

For much of the past two years, the technology industry has understandably focussed on advances in AI models. Every few months, we see improvements in reasoning, multimodal capabilities and agentic systems. Those advances will continue. However, what I hear from business leaders today is a different concern. The challenge is no longer access to AI. The challenge is integrating AI into the way enterprises actually work.

While 85% of Indian organisations believe agentic AI has the potential to transform their business, only 3% consider themselves fully prepared for it. At the same time, just 17% have more cross-functional AI deployments than isolated point solutions. These findings tell us that the constraint is no longer the technology itself. Most enterprises have spent decades building applications independently across finance, procurement, supply chains, HR and customer operations. Data often resides in multiple systems. Processes have evolved separately. Decision-making remains fragmented.

AI did not create these challenges. It simply makes them impossible to ignore. The organisations creating lasting value from AI are approaching the problem differently. Instead of asking where AI can be deployed next, they are asking how intelligence can be embedded into end-to-end business processes. That shift in thinking, from deploying AI to redesigning the enterprise, is where I believe the greatest value will be created.

Business context will define the next generation of AI

Much of the public conversation around AI understandably revolves around foundation models. Inside enterprises, however, business context is becoming the real differentiator. Generating content is one thing. Running a business is something entirely different.

An enterprise decision rarely exists in isolation. A sourcing decision influences inventory, manufacturing schedules and working capital. A disruption in logistics affects production, customer commitments and financial planning. Every business function depends on another. For AI to create meaningful enterprise value, it must understand these relationships. This is why I believe the future of enterprise AI will be shaped by business process intelligence rather than model size alone.

During SAP CEO Christian Klein’s recent visit to India, he spoke about the country’s unique strengths in this next phase of AI. He highlighted that the future lies not simply in building larger models but in enabling AI to understand how businesses operate, drawing on decades of enterprise process knowledge and engineering expertise. That observation resonates strongly with what we see across industries. Increasingly, organisations are recognising that trusted business data, connected processes and deep domain expertise provide the context AI needs to make reliable recommendations and support complex decisions. The conversation is therefore moving beyond intelligence in isolation towards intelligence grounded in business reality.

The Autonomous Enterprise is the next operating model

The last wave of digital transformation connected different parts of the business. The next wave will bring intelligence into those connected systems. People will continue to make decisions, while AI helps coordinate routine work across the enterprise. This is not about replacing people. It is about enabling people to focus on judgement, innovation, creativity, and leadership while intelligent systems handle repetitive coordination across the business. We believe this is the evolution towards the Autonomous Enterprise. Our experience working with organisations across industries has shown that AI delivers its greatest value when it is grounded in trusted business data, deep business process expertise and enterprise-grade governance. The goal is not simply to make individual tasks faster, but to enable businesses to operate as connected, intelligent systems that can adapt continuously to change.

India has repeatedly demonstrated its ability to lead every major technology transition over the past three decades. The next one will not be determined by who has access to the most advanced AI model. It will be determined by who can combine intelligence with trust, engineering with business context, and innovation with resilience. That is where I believe India’s next technology advantage will be built.

From India, for the world

Over the last two decades, India became the world’s technology backbone, building global platforms and delivering innovation at scale. Today, we are at another inflection point. With our unmatched engineering talent, thriving startup ecosystem and rapidly growing AI capabilities, India is well positioned to become a global powerhouse for enterprise AI innovation.

Across the ecosystem, startups are reimagining business processes with AI-first products, technology companies are building intelligent platforms for global markets, and enterprises are embedding AI into the core of how they operate. Increasingly, the question is no longer whether India will participate in the AI revolution, but how much of it we will shape.

I believe India has the opportunity to move beyond being a consumer and implementer of AI to becoming one of the architects of the intelligent enterprise. The technologies, platforms and AI-driven business models that redefine how organisations operate globally can increasingly be imagined, engineered and scaled from India, for the world.

(The author is MD, SAP Labs India; President, Indo German Chamber of Commerce; and former Chair, Nasscom. Views are personal.)