89% of Indian firms need data overhaul to unlock AI value: Report

Indian businesses must urgently modernise data strategies to unlock AI’s full potential, with poor-quality and siloed data undermining outcomes, a Salesforce report said. Nearly nine in 10 data leaders stressed the need for better governance, integration and context-rich data.

New Delhi: Indian businesses’ data readiness needs to be improved with 89 per cent of data and analytics leaders saying they must modernise data strategies for AI to deliver meaningful impact, a report said on Monday.

The report from Customer Relationship Management Salesforce said that 75 per cent of business leaders face increasing pressure to drive value with data, but incomplete, outdated, and poor‑quality data remains the biggest barrier.

---

This gap between data ambition and data reality becomes even more critical in the agentic AI era, the report noted.

Technical teams are focusing on timely, context‑rich data, stronger governance and zero copy architectures to unlock trapped, distributed data.

Around 52 per cent of organisations are adopting zero copy integration to access data in multiple different databases without having to move, copy, or reformat it, the report said.

Such companies are 40 per cent more likely to have fully connected customer data sources and 22 per cent more likely to succeed with AI initiatives, it noted.

Around 9 per cent of respondents said translation of business questions into technical queries is prone to error, while 95 per cent believed in better performance if data questions could be asked in native language.

The report warned that poor data is derailing AI effortsm, with 94 per cent of leaders with AI in production reported inaccurate or misleading outputs, and 50 per cent said they 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 26 per cent of organisational data is siloed and inaccessible, and 75 per cent believed their most valuable insights lie within that trapped data.