92% of Indian SMBs Bet Their Future on AI. Most Still Make the Final Call Themselves. Obviously.
A study of Indian small and medium businesses found that AI is lowering the cost and effort of experimenting with new markets and products, while also expanding content creation capabilities. Despite this, human judgement remains central. Business owners are still the most common final decision-makers, and fully automated advertising decisions without human review remain rare. A notable 92% of surveyed Indian SMBs said AI would be important to their future competitiveness.
This illustrates the principle of augmented rather than autonomous decision-making. The mechanism at work is human-in-the-loop automation, where AI expands the range of feasible experiments while a human retains veto power. The lesson: AI creates leverage, not replacement. The businesses winning are the ones using it to test more ideas faster, not the ones handing over the keys entirely.
Indian small and medium businesses surveyed in the study, as reported by the Economic Times. The study found that 92% of these businesses view AI as important to their future competitiveness.
- Open a free ChatGPT or Claude account and paste your product description with the prompt 'Suggest three new customer segments I haven't considered and one ad angle for each.' You will get three testable hypotheses in under a minute.
- Pick the suggestion that seems most plausible to your own judgement and write a short social media post or ad draft targeting that segment. The point is you, the human, choose which idea survives.
- Post it on whichever platform your current customers use most. Track engagement for one week. If it flops, you spent nothing but fifteen minutes. That is the low-cost experimentation the study describes.