Agentic AI: The Missing Link in India’s Compliance-Heavy Economy
India operates within a highly regulated environment, navigating more than 69,000 compliance requirements across central, state, and local laws. This complexity creates significant operational challenges across various sectors. In FY25, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) issued 353 penalties amounting to ₹54.78 crore for non-compliance.
Integrating Compliance into Daily Workflows
Under India’s new data protection regime, compliance is no longer a periodic control but must be embedded in daily workflows. This is crucial in sectors like BFSI (Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance), healthcare, and real estate, where documentation is intensive and customer interactions generate substantial amounts of sensitive data.
Despite this necessity, many organizations still depend on manual processes to interpret rules, check outputs, and correct errors. This reliance makes compliance reactive and slow, placing immense pressure on teams that are already stretched thin.
The Role of AI in Compliance
AI plays a pivotal role by automating repetitive, rules-based tasks, allowing organizations to handle large volumes of work more effectively. This automation frees teams to focus on higher-value activities. However, traditional automation struggles when compliance requires judgment, contextual understanding, or adaptation to rapidly changing rules.
Agentic AI: A Shift in Compliance Enforcement
Agentic AI revolutionizes compliance by transitioning from a human-led review function to a system-led enforcement model. Compliance rules are automatically enforced within the workflow, featuring built-in policies, inline checks, automated validations, and audit trails. This proactive approach prevents compliance issues before they arise.
This evolution builds upon automation journeys already initiated by some organizations. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) first automated repetitive tasks, and Agentic AI expanded this capability to process unstructured data and support complex decision-making. By orchestrating automation and AI, Agentic AI manages end-to-end workflows with integrated governance, enabling systems to act, adapt, and remain accountable.
Case Study: Shriram Properties
Shriram Properties, a leading real estate developer in India, exemplifies the importance of embedding compliance into workflows. Through its digital transformation, the company automated complex processes across finance, HR, and supply chain. The results were striking: manual SAP entry decreased by 70%, data accuracy soared to 99%, and over 1,000 days of effort were reclaimed annually.
Reducing Variance: A Key Advantage
While discussions around Agentic AI often emphasize autonomy and speed, a crucial advantage for Indian enterprises is its capacity to reduce variance. Variance complicates compliance and creates unpredictable quality. It manifests in manual data entry, differing interpretations of rules, and inconsistent documentation.
Agentic AI minimizes this variance by applying rules consistently, ensuring no steps are skipped, and producing audit-ready output automatically. Teams can thus rely on workflows to be accurate and dependable, even under pressure.
A New Trust Architecture for India
As digital public infrastructure expands and the data protection regime evolves, India’s compliance demands will only increase. Globally, governance is becoming essential to AI adoption, with the AI governance market projected to grow from USD 227 million today to USD 4.8 billion by 2034. This trend indicates a future where oversight is inseparable from innovation.
For CXOs, the focus is no longer just on whether AI can expedite work, but on whether it can make work safer, clearer, and more reliable. Agentic AI delivers this promise, enabling enterprises to grow while reinforcing the trust needed from regulators, customers, and partners. In India’s compliance-heavy markets, the ability to embed trust into everyday operations is rapidly becoming a key competitive advantage.
