New Delhi — Indian businesses need to significantly improve data readiness, with 89 percent of data and analytics leaders saying they must modernize data strategies for artificial intelligence to deliver meaningful impact, according to a report released on Monday.
The report by customer relationship management firm Salesforce found that 75 percent of business leaders are under growing pressure to extract value from data, but incomplete, outdated, and poor-quality data remains the biggest obstacle. The gap between data ambition and data reality becomes even more critical in the emerging era of agentic AI, it noted.
According to the report, technical teams are increasingly focusing on timely, context-rich data, stronger governance frameworks, and zero-copy architectures to unlock data that remains fragmented across systems. About 52 percent of organizations are adopting zero-copy integration, which allows access to data across multiple databases without moving, copying, or reformatting it.
Companies using zero-copy integration are 40 percent more likely to have fully connected customer data sources and 22 percent more likely to succeed with AI initiatives, the report said.
The study also highlighted challenges in translating business needs into technical execution. About 89 percent of respondents said that translating business questions into technical queries is prone to error, while 95 percent said AI performance would improve if data questions could be asked in native language.
The report warned that poor data quality is undermining AI efforts. Among leaders with AI systems already in production, 94 percent reported encountering inaccurate or misleading outputs, and 50 percent said they had wasted significant resources training AI models on bad data.
“AI cannot fix what incomplete data creates. For India to truly unlock the promise of agentic AI, leaders must treat data as a strategic asset — unified, governed, and contextual,” said Deepu Chacko, VP – Solution Engineering at Salesforce India.
Data and analytics leaders estimated that about 26 percent of organizational data remains siloed and inaccessible, while 75 percent believe their most valuable insights are trapped within that unused data. (Source: IANS)
