Leaders and laggards of the AI race: India makes significant progress, Germany, Spain still falling behind

As many as 91 per cent of Indiabased companies will use half or more of their data to train AI models in 2024, data infrastructure company NetApp said in its second annual Cloud Complexity Report.

The findings were part of NetApp’s quantitative research study of more than 1,300 tech and data executives at businesses across 10 markets, done in partnership with Savanta. The report touted India as leading the charge when it comes to AI projects, closely followed by Singapore. Other countries like Germany and Spain were bracketed as being laggards in the AI race.


The report said that the rise of AI is creating a new ‘disruptor-die era’, and the world is being divided into AI leaders and AI laggards. Here are the key takeaways from the report:

What percentage of your data will be used to train AI models in the next year?
91 per cent of India-based companies will use half or more of their data to train AI models in 2024, compared to only 28 per cent of Japanbased companies.

Which sectors are leading in the AI journey?
Technology leads with 70 per cent of AI projects up and running or in pilot. Only 25 per cent of media and entertainment companies have AI projects either up and running or in motion compared to 55 per cent of banking & finance companies and 50 per cent of manufacturing companies.

What impact will ai projects have on your organisation’s IT costs?
Rising IT costs and ensuring data security are two of the biggest challenges in the AI era, but they will not block AI progress. Instead, AI leaders will scale back, cut other IT operations, or reallocate costs from other parts of the business to fund AI initiatives.

53 per cent of India-based companies and 56 per cent of Singapore-based companies are more likely to scale back or cut other parts of IT operations to make room for AI projects.