83% Indian firms have appointed chief AI officers to fast-track Gen AI adoption: AWS study

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Nearly 83 percent Indian enterprises have appointed Chief AI Officers (CAIO) to accelerate generative AI adoption, while another 15 percent is set to hire one by 2026, a study launched on June 19 by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Access Partnership revealed.

This is driven by the evolving leadership structures to meet new demands and creating new career opportunities for AI-skilled talent at the highest levels of organisations. Until now, AI innovations at organisations were predominantly led by Chief Executive Officers (CEOs), Chief Technology Officers (CTOs), and Chief Innovation Officers (CIOs).

In fact, 64 percent of the companies surveyed have added AI as a top priority in their budget for 2025, followed by security (21 percent) and compute (10 percent), the report said. Companies are looking for executing organization-wide AI strategy through effective change in management.

"While 75 percent of organisations do not have a change management strategy to help employees navigate a future shaped by Gen AI today, the number is expected to drop to 9% by the end of 2026," the report said.

Overall, in India, Gen AI adoption has been on par with the global counterparts, at 98 percent organisations using Gen AI tools with 95 percent actively experimenting to unlock new applications. Almost 49 percent of these experiments are expected to move to production in 2025.

The study surveyed 415 senior IT decision-makers in India across industries such as financial services, information and communications technology, manufacturing, and retail.

Satinder Pal Singh, head of Solution Architecture, AWS India and South Asia said, "We see a growing recognition of AI as a transformative technology that requires strategic leadership at the highest levels and a structured approach to change management."

"For India, this is not merely about technology adoption; it's about cultivating a mindset of continuous innovation and harnessing AI as a strategic lever to reimagine customer experiences and rearchitect how work gets done," Singh added.

AWS' India investments

In the 2023 edition of AWS Summit, the cloud service provider had announced that it will be investing about $12.7 billion in India to develop cloud infrastructure by 2030. Around $8.3 billion of this was later deployed in Maharashtra.

Speaking at AWS Summit 2025 in Mumbai, Sandeep Dutta, president, AWS India and South Asia said, "We're all aware that India is on the cusp of becoming a $1 trillion digital economy. At AWS, we continue to deepen our commitment towards India. Our regions across Mumbai and Hyderabad, with a planned investment of $12.7 billion till 2030, are ready to fuel the next level of growth from India."

"Through our planned investments, we hope to contribute close to $23.3 billion towards India GDP by 2030 and will end up supporting 131,700 full-time jobs annually through local businesses," he added.

Dutta shared success stories of Gen AI deployment of some of its key customers. For instance, Zomato is using Gen AI to transform its restaurant imaging process.

Zomato has been able to cut down image processing time from more than 48 hours to less than 8 hours and has reduced the rejection rate from more than 75 percent down to 20 percent, Dutta said. Even Zomato's restaurant partners today can upload their menus at a pace, which is 5X faster than before.

Online stock trading and investment platform in India, Dhan, has used Generative AI build competitive advantage for themselves.

"They're trading in engines and algorithms which work at a speed of 20 milliseconds which is 6 times faster than the industry average and result in giving a 0.1% price advantage with every trade. The result? In three years, Dhan has moved from being the 300th online platform to now being the 9th largest online trading platform in India supporting more than 1.2 million online traders," Dutta said.

Upskilling and training plans

Singh shared that in the overall AI and cloud space, AWS has trained more than 31 million people worldwide as of July 2024, exceeding way beyond the company's initial target of upskilling 29 million by the end of 2025.

Of this, around 5.9 million people were trained in India alone.

According to the AWS report, around 81 percent of the organisations surveyed have developed Gen AI training plans, while 11 percent will develop one by the end of 2025 to meet the growing demand for AI talent.