AI risks spark 30% surge in India cybersecurity spends

Published 24 June 2026 · tech

The rush to adopt artificial intelligence (AI) is triggering a cybersecurity spending wave across corporate India, with investments increasing 30% year-on-year as companies move to

The rush to adopt artificial intelligence (AI) is triggering a cybersecurity spending wave across corporate India, with investments increasing 30% year-on-year as companies move to protect data, digital operations and AI systems, said Data Security Council of India chief executive Vinayak Godse.“Even sectors like manufacturing, which were not investing enough in cybersecurity earlier, are digitising aggressively and increasing investments,” he told ET, adding that larger cybersecurity investments would increasingly become the norm as enterprises prepare for the unprecedented risks and AI-powered deception that could accompany wider adoption of the technology.The trend is already showing up in enterprise budgets. Cybersecurity budgets have risen to about 17% of total IT capital allocation, according to global research firm Forrester, making security one of the fastest-growing areas of technology spending.The shift reflects a growing reality for companies deploying AI at scale. Alongside investments in cloud infrastructure, computing power and talent, businesses are being forced to spend more on monitoring, threat detection and cyber resilience as AI expands the attack surface and creates new risks.The spending surge is being driven not only by AI-related risks but also by growing pressure on security teams.

Aaron Bugal, field chief information security officer at global cybersecurity company Sophos, said many organisations are already struggling to cope with the volume of alerts and vulnerabilities generated by increasingly complex digital environments.“The honest conversation happening inside security operations right now is not about whether the volume is too high, it is about how to function at all under the weight of it,” Bugal said.According to Sophos, exploited vulnerabilities remained the leading technical root cause of ransomware incidents for the third consecutive year, accounting for 32% of attacks. “Security teams are increasingly spending time prioritising and filtering threats rather than fixing them, prompting greater investment in automation, monitoring and managed security services,” he said.Regulatory requirements are also adding to the urgency. Earlier this month, the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), the national nodal agency for cybersecurity, issued guidelines for organisations developing and deploying AI systems, asking them to strengthen vulnerability reporting, security testing and risk management practices as enterprises increasingly integrate AI into their operations.