India leads APAC in AI adoption with 60% of shoppers seeking personal AI agents

26 Jun 2026, 05:53 by KalingaTV Bureau · KalingaTV

In the Asia-Pacific region, Indian consumers are exhibiting the strongest appetite for advanced artificial intelligence, with a whopping 60 percent clearly wanting to build their own personal AI agents. Adobe’s 16th annual AI and Digital Trends Report reveals that India now leads neighbouring markets, contrary to corporate expectations, in its preparedness to embrace “agentic AI” autonomous systems that act on behalf of the user to carry out complex tasks. This change is radically transforming the Indian retail landscape with the common shopper aggressively adopting smart tools for quick and hyper-personalized consumer experiences.

Adobe data reveals that 65 percent of Indian consumers are already actively using AI to get personalised product recommendations, and 62 percent would use a virtual AI concierge to do their shopping chores. 60% of shoppers in the area use these automated tools for immediate customer service and digital troubleshooting.

This highlights a deep cultural readiness for completely automated, software-driven brand interactions. More than half of Indian consumers (55 percent) note they would happily converse with a brand’s dedicated AI agent. Even more striking is the emergence of peer-to-peer automation: 58 percent are comfortable with “agent-to-agent” interactions, and 61 percent feel completely secure letting a personal AI agent negotiate or interact with a brand’s human representative on their behalf.

However, there is still a large expectation gap between the day-to-day consumers and the enterprises serving them. Local corporate brands are mostly concentrating their AI strategies on reducing operational expenses and enhancing the efficiency of their internal workforce, while consumers are evaluating the efficacy of AI based on trust, data transparency and problem-solving abilities. Adobe leadership says massive user adoption is entirely dependent on companies offering transparent operational contexts with readily available human guardrails.

Finally, the report stresses that human touch is the ultimate deciding factor for brand loyalty in the subcontinent. A prominent 76 percent of Indian consumers demand that AI-driven interactions feel naturally human rather than robotic, and 61 percent warn they would completely sever ties with a company if they discovered they were talking to a machine when expecting human support.

To bridge this trust gap, consumers point to two clear prerequisites: 21 percent demand explicit labeling when a tool is driven by AI, and 17 percent require the ability to instantly hand off a conversation to a human representative.

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