India is projected to outpace the global forecast of 30%, increasing pressure on mobile networks to deliver faster response times and greater uplink capacity.
Daily use of multimodal artificial intelligence (AI) in India is expected to nearly double by 2030, rising from 22% today to 43%, according to new research from Ericsson ConsumerLab. The projected adoption rate is significantly higher than the global forecast of 30%.
The findings point to growing consumer use of AI across text, voice, images and video, with interactions increasingly taking place across multiple devices and while users are on the move. This shift is expected to create new demands on mobile networks, particularly as consumers upload more multimedia content to AI services.
Nitin Bansal, Managing Director, Ericsson India, said AI was becoming integral to how consumers search, create and communicate. As AI experiences become more mobile and multimodal, users will expect reliable performance across devices and locations.
“High-performing networks will be important to delivering the responsiveness, capacity and reliability that emerging AI experiences will require.” — Nitin Bansal, Managing Director, Ericsson India
The report also highlights the emergence of AI super users. Globally, they currently account for around 10% of consumers but are projected to represent 30% by 2030 while generating more than 80% of all AI activity. For these users, response time has 2.5 times the influence on network satisfaction compared with average users.
Agentic AI is another emerging trend. Across the markets surveyed, 38% of smartphone users expect to use AI agents by 2030, compared with 4% today. Consumers anticipate saving around one hour of screen time daily through services that can perform tasks such as making bookings, comparing products and managing schedules.
The study also identifies trust as a concern, with more than half of daily AI users strongly worried about fake or compromised AI assistants. Communications service providers rank as the most trusted ecosystem actors for verifying assistant identities.
The research draws on responses from more than 43,000 smartphone users aged 15–69 across 27 markets.