Bajaj Finance, a 39-year-old NBFC, is out-AI-ing AI startups. It is on track to have 360+ dedicated employees working in its AI org by March next year, up from 203 today. It is the one company I look up to to understand where enterprise AI is actually headed in India.
A few highlights:
- ₹5,520 crore in loans disbursed off leads generated by AI voice and text bots in FY26 alone
- 27 autonomous AI agents live in production (targeting 600+ by FY27)
- 100% of internal Business Requirement Documents will be drafted by AI
- 65% of customers self-serving through AI voice and text bots
- 12.2 million face-recognition matches across stores and branches
The bigger point is this. Indian enterprise AI conversations are dominated by either AI startups (which are selling) or McKinsey-style reports on how US enterprises are deploying AI (which assume US-scale budgets). Neither is a useful reference point for what enterprise AI actually looks like at Indian scale.
Bajaj Finance is the company doing the actual buying, building, and shipping at that scale.
It has caught every major inflection in Indian consumer finance early, from EMI at the point of sale to app-led lending and now AI. Each time, the gap from "we're going to do this" to "this is now material to the P&L" has been measured in quarters, not in years.
The rest of the industry always ends up catching up to them, not the other way around.