Imagine your cybersecurity team as a group of highly-trained detectives. For decades, they’ve been running through digital crime scenes with magnifying glasses, reacting to the broken window or the missing safe after the fact. Now, suddenly, they have been handed a crystal ball—one that not only detects the threat but forecasts the modus operandi of the attacker before they even step onto the property. That crystal ball is Artificial Intelligence, and the transformation it’s bringing to cyber defense is less a technological upgrade and more a fundamental re-engineering of the entire security operation.
Palo Alto Networks, in partnership with the Data Security Council of India (DSCI), released the State of AI Adoption for Cybersecurity in India report. The report found that only 24% of CXOs consider their organizations fully prepared for AI-driven threats, underscoring a significant gap between adoption intent and operational readiness. The report sets a clear baseline for India Inc., examining where AI adoption stands, what organizations are investing in next, and how the threat landscape is changing. It also surfaces capability and talent gaps, outlines governance, and details preferred deployment models.
While the intent to leverage AI for enhanced cyber defense is almost universal, its operational reality is still maturing. The data reveals a clear gap between strategic ambition and deployed scale.
The report underscores the dual reality of AI: it is a potent defense mechanism but also a primary source of emerging threat vectors. Key findings include:
- Adoption intent is high, maturity is low: 79% of organizations plan to integrate AI/ML towards AI-enabled cybersecurity, but 40% remain in the pilot stage. The main goal is operational speed, prioritizing the reduction of Mean Time to Detect and Respond (MTTD/MTTR).
- Investments are Strategic: 64% of organizations are now proactively investing through multi-year risk-management roadmaps.
- Threats are AI-Accelerated: 23% of the organizations are resetting priorities due to new AI-enabled attack paradigms. The top threats are coordinated multi-vector attacks and AI-poisoned supply chains.
- Biggest Barriers: Financial overhead (19%) and the skill/talent deficit (17%) are the leading roadblocks to adoption.
- Future Defense Model: 31% of organizations consider Human-AI Hybrid Defense Teams as an AI transforming cybersecurity approach and 33% of organizations require human approval for AI-enabled critical security decisions and actions.
“AI is at the heart of most serious security conversations in India, sometimes as the accelerator, sometimes as the adversary itself. This study, developed with DSCI, makes one thing clear: appetite and intent are high, but execution and operational discipline are lagging,” said Swapna Bapat, Vice President and Managing Director, India & SAARC, Palo Alto Networks. “Catching up means using AI to defend against AI, but success demands robustness. Given the dynamic nature of building and deploying AI apps, continuous red teaming of AI is an absolute must to achieve that robustness. It requires coherence: a platform that unifies signals across network, operations, and identity; Zero-Trust verification designed into every step; and humans in the loop for decisions that carry real risk. That’s how AI finally moves from shaky pilots to robust protection.”
Vinayak Godse, CEO, DSCI, said “India is at a critical juncture where AI is reshaping both the scale of cyber threats and the sophistication of our defenses. AI enabled attacker capabilities are rapidly increasing in scale and sophistication. Simultaneously, AI adoption for cyber security can strengthen security preparedness to navigate risk, governance, and operational readiness to predict, detect, and respond to threats in real time. This AI adoption study, supported by Palo Alto Networks, reflects DSCI’s efforts to provide organizations with insights to navigate the challenges emerging out of AI enabled attacks for offense while leveraging AI for security defense.
The report was based on a survey of 160+ organizations across BFSI, manufacturing, technology, government, education, and mid-market enterprises, covering CXOs, security leaders, business unit heads, and functional teams.
