Indian banks bet on AI but hold back on scale amid deployment concerns

Artificial intelligence (AI) has crossed the threshold from experimentation to daily operations in Indian banking. As many as seven out of 10 chief data officers (CDOs) report using AI “actively” at their banks — with 30 per cent having reached scaled deployment. However, adoption remains constrained to low-stakes, reviewable tasks like customer support, fraud detection, document handling and software quality assurance. When it comes to end-to-end operational workflows or high-consequence decision-making, deployment drops off sharply. These findings stem from banking technology firm Zeta’s 2026 survey, which polled 40 C-suite executives across 18 major Indian banks and non-banking financial companies.

 

 

COO: Chief operating officer; Casa: Current account and savings account

 

Source: Zeta’s CXO Survey & Report 2026: Crossing the AI Divide