What’s driving India Inc’s digital spending

Expenditure on digital technology by Indian companies surged by 25% for the year ended March 2024, the fastest pace in at least five years accelerating from around  20-22% in the previous years, as per data collated by SalesEdge, a technology sector research database and a sister unit of Techcircle.
 
The data captures numbers of 96,500 Indian companies, ranging from small enterprises to large conglomerates across sectors such as banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI), infrastructure, and media. Key technologies driving these investments include cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI), analytics, next-generation security solutions, Internet of Things (IoT), enterprise mobility, augmented reality/virtual reality (AR/VR), blockchain, and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) initiatives.
 

 
In total, digital tech spending touched ₹2,258,349.1 crore (approximately $268 billion) with cloud continuing to be a major driver of this expenditure. In FY24 alone, spending on this technology formed one-third of the digital spending pie. In fact, from the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic (FY21), cloud expenditures doubled.
 
Over the past five years, AI has risen to become the second-largest area of digital spending, surpassing investments in cybersecurity and enterprise mobility.

Enterprise mobility which was the second biggest area behind cloud as of FY20 has slipped to the number fifth lot, even below IoT during FY24.