BusinessWire India
New Delhi [India], August 28: Infobip, the global cloud communications platform, revealed in its latest report - The AI Advantage: How Leading Brands Thrive in a 24 x 7 Customer World - how India's hyper-connected consumers are reshaping expectations for real-time engagement, and why AI is fast becoming the only way for brands to keep pace.
With mobile penetration now at 110% in India - more connections than people - customers are connected across multiple devices and messaging platforms, from WhatsApp to Instagram and Telegram. This hyper-connectivity is driving new behavior: switching between apps mid-conversation, expecting brands to follow with instant, context-aware, and culturally relevant responses, regardless of time or channel.
This trend is mirrored across the Asia-Pacific, where mobile connectivity rates exceed 100% in nearly every market --264% in Hong Kong SAR, 150% in Singapore, 145% in Taiwan region, 140% in both Japan and South Korea, 130% in Malaysia, and 110% in Mainland China. Even in emerging markets such as Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam, penetration is at or above 110%.
Businesses are still struggling to meet the customers where they are, even when they are present across channels. IDC research underpinning the Infobip report shows that improving customer experience (CX) is the biggest operational challenge for 43% of Asia-Pacific businesses, including India. Key barriers include siloed data, disconnected channel strategies, and the cost of delivering always-on support across India's diverse languages, cultures, and regulatory environments.
The report highlights how AI technologies, including generative AI, agentic AI, and conversational AI, enable brands to streamline operations and deliver seamless, real-time experiences across every customer touchpoint.
"The conversation around AI for customer engagement across Asia-Pacific has fundamentally shifted from 'if' to 'how' -- 'how deeply and how quickly'. The 'always-on' customer now has a baseline expectation of instant gratification, which traditional business models cannot simply scale to meet. Hence, the new competitive frontier is not just about having AI but about orchestrating advanced capabilities such as generative AI and agentic AI, to craft proactive customer journeys that build lasting customer relationships," said Nikhil Batra, Senior Research Director, IDC Asia-Pacific.
IDC predicts that by 2028, consumers in the Asia-Pacific region will spend US$32 billion via AI agents running independently on smartphones to programmatically shop for goods and services. Businesses are racing to respond, with companies projected to invest over US$30 billion in AI infrastructure and platforms by 2027 to deliver the kind of personalized, always-on service customers now take for granted. According to IDC, enterprise AI investment in customer service and marketing across Asia-Pacific is growing at a compound annual rate of 35% through 2029 -- with India leading at 41% CAGR, reflecting the scale and urgency of transformation. By 2028, 40% of mid-tier B2C brands in the region will be using autonomous AI agents to offer "white glove" levels of service once reserved for luxury customers.
Harsha Solanki, VP GM Asia at Infobip, said, "Across India and Asia-Pacific, consumers now live across multiple messaging apps and expect brands to move with them, creating a zero-wait mindset where there's no tolerance for queues, redirection, or repetition. Businesses are realizing that legacy systems and early AI attempts, like rule-based chatbots without customer context, can't meet this standard. To deliver at scale, enterprises must embrace advanced AI that understands context, anticipates needs, and orchestrates seamless, end-to-end journeys. AI is no longer an experiment; it has become the engine room of customer experience in the region."
Infobip is at the center of this transformation, powering businesses with its Conversational Experience Orchestration Platform (CXOP) - a solution that places agentic AI at the heart of every customer interaction. CXOP unifies messaging, automation, and AI-powered assistance within a single, intelligent platform that adapts to behavior, sentiment, and intent in real time. This solution sets a new standard, one where brands and users engage in intelligent, meaningful, and outcome-driven conversations.
The AI Advantage: How Leading Brands Thrive in a 24 x 7 Customer World report is available at https://bit.ly/40X54uy, offering APAC businesses a practical roadmap for turning AI from a buzzword into a true competitive advantage.
About Infobip
Infobip is a global cloud communications platform that enables businesses to build connected experiences across all stages of the customer journey. Accessed through a single platform, Infobip's omnichannel engagement, identity, user authentication and contact centre solutions help businesses and partners overcome the complexity of consumer communications to grow business and increase loyalty. It offers natively built technology with the capacity to reach over seven billion mobile devices and 'things' in 6 continents connected to over 9,700+ connections of which 800+ are direct operator connections. Infobip was established in 2006 and is led by its co-founders, CEO Silvio Kutic and Izabel Jelenic.
Recent award wins include:
- Infobip named a Leader in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) for the third consecutive year. In 2025, positioned furthest in Completeness of Vision (July 2025)
- Infobip named among Top 75 in Fortune's Europe's Most Innovative Companies 2025, placing it in the top 25% of all listed organizations (June 2025)
- Infobip ranked as a Leader in the Omdia CPaaS Universe Report for the third time (April 2025)
- Infobip ranked an Established Leader in the Juniper Research Conversational AI Leaderboard (Feb 2025)
- Infobip named a CPaaS Leader for the third time in the IDC MarketScape (Feb 2025)
- Infobip named one of the top CPaaS providers in Metrigy's CPaaS MetriRank Report (Dec 2024)
- Infobip named number one among Established Leaders in RCS Business Messaging in Juniper Research's RCS Business Messaging Competitor Leaderboard 2024 (Nov 2024)
- Infobip recognized as the number one provider in the AIT Fraud Prevention market by Juniper Research (Oct 2024)
- Infobip named to Fast Company's Annual List of the World's Most Innovative Companies (March 2024)
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