IT, BFSI & telecom headline India's AI cybersecurity push

Banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI), information technology services and telecom are emerging as the front-runners in India’s adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) in cybersecurity, driven by high-stakes threats such as fraud, credential theft, ransomware and network-level attacks, said experts.

“Banks, fintechs and insurance companies rely heavily on AI for fraud detection, identity monitoring and behavioural analytics. Regulatory pressure and instant payment ecosystems make automated threat detection essential,” said Ravindra Baviskar, director=sales engineering (India & SAARC) at Sophos, a global cybersecurity firm.

IT/ITeS is close behind, according to him. “These companies manage global customer data and distributed cloud environments, so AI-assisted threat detection and response help handle scale, alert fatigue and sophisticated attacks,” he said.


A December 2025 joint report by the Data Security Council of India and Palo Alto Networks confirmed this, saying technology/IT/ITeS and BFSI were the lead adopters and describing IT firms as early adopters and innovation drivers in AI-enabled security, focused on “continuous compliance monitoring and anomaly detection”.

The report said that 88.9% of BFSI organisations characterise their AI-led cybersecurity investments in India as proactive and strategic. It added that about 8.3% of organisations overall have reached full production integration of AI, mostly in IT/ITeS and financial sectors, where AI is now embedded within core security functions.

“BFSI is unquestionably the largest adopter and spender on AI-driven cybersecurity in India, and also the most exposed,” said Rakesh Raghuvanshi, founder and CEO of Sekel Tech.

Globally, he said, the AI market in BFSI is projected to reach $64.3 billion by 2030, with India among the fastest-growing contributors. The company anticipates the market to grow further at a CAGR 15.6% starting 2025 , driven by AI and ML integration. he added.

“India has a once-in-a-generation AI opportunity — and BFSI is already leading adoption because it has the data, the urgency and the regulatory pressure. Over the next few years, AI will move from pilots to everyday operations across enterprises, and cybersecurity consumption will rise in parallel," said Vishal Gauri, CEO of Seclore, a global data security intelligence company.

His company is also seeing significant demand from the government, particularly national security agencies, armed forces and ministries handling sensitive information. With the US market increasingly saturated, Gauri said India and West Asia are now Seclore's biggest markets, with adoption “skyrocketing”.

Telecom is increasingly seen as the next major frontier. Girish Hirde, global delivery head at InfoVision, said, “As India’s digital economy expands through cloud migration, 5G, Industry 4.0 and AI-native startups, cybersecurity is shifting from being a compliance requirement to a strategic investment.”

Garry Singh, president of IIRIS Consulting, pointed to telecom and 5G ecosystems as a particularly urgent case. “With edge computing, private 5G and massive IoT (Internet of Things) vectors, the attack surface increases non-linearly. Legacy security cannot scale here; AI is foundational," he said.

Baviskar also said that India’s AI led cybersecurity is being set by BFSI and telecom sectors, scaled up by IT/ITeS and now moving rapidly into government platforms and healthcare. “Healthcare and telecom will expand adoption due to sensitive data and large-scale networks,” he said.