India has emerged as one of the fastest adopters of artificial intelligence (AI) in the workplace, with employees more likely than their global peers to integrate AI into their daily work. However, the country has also reported the highest rate of unsuccessful AI pilots, according to Salesforce’s Agentic Workplace Study.
The study found that workers in India are 45% more likely than the global average to say AI is part of their core workflow, the highest among all surveyed markets. At the same time, 38% of Indian respondents said their organisation experienced an unsuccessful AI pilot over the past year, compared with the global average of 28%.
According to Salesforce, the findings indicate that while Indian enterprises are embracing AI rapidly, employees are looking for solutions that understand business context, integrate with existing workflows and are tailored to specific job roles, rather than generic AI tools.
The study also found that 49% of Indian workers consider themselves AI skeptics, higher than the global average of 37%, suggesting that greater exposure to AI has also led to higher expectations around trust, relevance and usability.
Among respondents whose AI pilots failed to deliver expected outcomes, 34% cited a lack of business context as the primary reason, compared with the global average of 22%. Other reasons included limited ability to personalise AI for specific roles or tasks (31%), generic outputs (31%), insufficient training (29%) and the use of too many different AI tools (28%).
“India’s AI story is now about execution. The workforce is experiencing AI in the flow of work, and that experience is creating a more mature expectation from technology — AI that understands their business, supports their role, and helps them make decisions with confidence,” said Deepu Chacko, vice-president, solution engineering, Salesforce.
He said organisations should focus on connecting AI with enterprise data, redesigning workflows, building trust and equipping employees to work alongside AI agents to realise productivity gains.
The survey, conducted by YouGov on behalf of Salesforce between December 2025 and January 2026, covered more than 1,500 desk workers across 13 countries, including 120 respondents from India.
