Mumbai: Indian enterprises are bullish about adopting artificial intelligence (AI), but face the challenge of scaling pilot projects with adequate security, governance or return on investment, top corporate leaders said at the Economic Times AI Vantage roundtable on Privacy, Security & Risk: Building Trustworthy AI Through Strong Governance in Mumbai.Companies are discovering that AI adoption is less about choosing the latest frontier model and more about redesigning workflows, securing data, training employees and building resilience, they said.“There is no lack of ambition, but there is significant technical debt, along with trust issues and governance challenges,” said Cisco India and South Asia president Daisy Chittilapilly. Citing Cisco’s latest AI Readiness Index, she said more than 80% of organisations want AI agents integrated into their workforce this year, but less than 30% believe they are ready from a security, infrastructure and data perspective. Parminder Singh, chief executive of Reliance Enterprise Intelligence, said industry is now entering the second phase where enterprises need help answering more fundamental questions. They first need to determine which model best suits each workflow instead of defaulting to the latest frontier model. “The winners on the podium will continue to keep changing. Don’t get too excited by a particular model,” he said.For financial services, where a single AI error could have significant consequences, security can no longer be treated as an afterthought, said Ambarish Kenghe, group CEO of stock trading and broking platform Angel One.He identified three key risks enterprises must guard against: AI generating incorrect information, leakage of sensitive customer data and autonomous systems behaving unpredictably. “The more powerful the technology, the more careful you have to be,” Kenghe said, stressing that organisations must build security and safety by design into AI systems from the outset.ET Special