Issue 01 was about companies: who turned a profit, who didn't. This issue is a different kind of brief entirely: not what happened this week, but what the numbers actually say about how Indian consumers discover, research and buy right now — and where the data disagrees with itself.
The Base Everything Else Builds On
India crossed 886 million active internet users in 2024, up 8% year-on-year, per the IAMAI-Kantar ICUBE 2024 household survey (over 90,000 households across every state and union territory except Lakshadweep). Rural users now outnumber urban ones in absolute terms, but the activity mix still splits along predictable lines: rural usage leads on OTT, social and communication, while urban users remain more active in commerce, digital payments and online education. The practical read: "India's internet is mostly rural now" is true and also misleading on its own, since it doesn't follow that rural shoppers outnumber urban ones.Study Finding
Source: IAMAI + Kantar, Internet in India Report 2024.
Consumer Behaviour: GenAI Adoption Is an India Story, Not Just a Global One
Awareness and usage of generative AI among Indian consumers is running well ahead of casual-interest levels. BCG's research found generative AI awareness at 94% and actual usage at 62% among surveyed Indian consumers, describing India as a global hotspot where AI is becoming a daily assistant rather than a novelty.Study Finding
Source: Boston Consulting Group, via MIT Sloan Management Review Middle East.
Among people who already use generative AI tools, the behaviour goes further: Accenture's Consumer Pulse survey found 95% of active GenAI users in India have used, or would use, AI tools to help with purchase decisions. That's a stat about an already-adopted subgroup, not all Indian consumers, so it shouldn't be read as "most Indian shoppers use AI to buy things." A separate, broader 2026 edition of the same Accenture research found something more striking: nearly 30% of all consumers in India now use large language models as their primary product-discovery channel, and 94% said they'd like to shop directly inside generative AI tools if given the option. The two Accenture figures measure different populations (active users vs. everyone) and shouldn't be blended into one number, but together they describe a market moving in one direction, fast.Study Finding
Source: Accenture Consumer Pulse, via CXOToday.
Market Movements: Festive Ecommerce, and a Number That Doesn't Agree With Itself
Redseer's festive-season tracking (Sept 15-Oct 31, 2024) put India's ecommerce GMV during that window at roughly USD 14 billion, up 12% year-on-year, with Tier 2+ cities growing spending 13% YoY, outpacing metros. A quieter but arguably more important finding sits underneath the headline number: existing customers spent 5-6% more per person even as new-shopper acquisition slowed, suggesting a market that's maturing into repeat-purchase behaviour rather than one still mostly growing through new users.Study Finding
How many Indians actually shop online is a genuinely disputed number, and we're stating that plainly rather than picking a side. Redseer puts the online shopper base at roughly 250 million annual shoppers; separate 2025 industry coverage cites a higher 290-300 million figure. The gap likely comes down to definition, annual active buyer versus ever-transacted, rather than one source simply being wrong, but the higher figure's primary source couldn't be confirmed as a named, transparent publisher. The defensible number to use is the lower, better-sourced 250 million.Conflicting estimates
Source: Redseer, via Outlook Money.
New Data Worth Knowing: B2B Buyers Are Avoiding Your Sales Team
This one isn't India-specific, but it's a genuinely useful number for any B2B or SaaS business reading this. Gartner's global B2B buyer research (750 buyers surveyed) found buyers spend about 45% of their total purchase-process time in independent research, versus only about 17% of their time with potential suppliers, which works out to roughly 5-6% of total time per supplier when evaluating three vendors. Separately, 77% of B2B buyers describe their most recent purchase as complex or difficult, and 90% said they looped back to redo at least one step in their decision process. More recently, G2's 2025 Buyer Behavior Report found about two-thirds of B2B software buyers now prefer to engage sales only after finishing their own research, up 17 points from 2024, and its 2026 follow-up found 82% of B2B software buyers had used AI chatbots to source software recommendations in the prior two years, with about half now starting research with a chatbot.Study Finding
None of this is India-verified, and G2 is a vendor with a commercial interest in the "AI search is changing buying" narrative it's reporting on, which is worth holding in mind. But the directional pattern, buyers doing more alone, later, and increasingly starting with an AI chatbot rather than a search engine, is consistent across both Gartner's and G2's independent datasets.Global, not India-verified
Sources: Gartner, via Smarter With Gartner; G2, via G2 Buyer Behavior Report.
What We Updated Since Issue 01
Two existing guides got real figure upgrades this week, not new articles, updates to pages that already existed: How Google AI Overviews Work now carries Ahrefs' more precise December 2025 position-by-position CTR data (58% down at #1, still 19.4% down at #10) alongside Seer Interactive's independently corroborating figure, replacing a vaguer range. How AI Is Changing Product Discovery now includes the India-specific adoption numbers from this issue, since the original piece was global-only. Three other guides, on reputation management, healthcare local SEO and website trust, also picked up new sourced figures this cycle. This is the update-in-place principle this Brief is built around: strengthen an existing page with better data rather than publish a near-duplicate.
How we built this issue
Every figure above traces to a named, dated source linked inline, drawn from an internal research library that separates Verified Fact from Study Finding from Interpretation, and explicitly flags conflicting data rather than resolving it silently (the online-shopper-base figure above is the clearest example). Where a statistic is global rather than India-specific, that's stated directly rather than implied. Nothing here is SumukhAI's own estimate unless labeled as our interpretation.