Indian non-profits lag on digital maturity, AI adoption: report

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While AI systems have made it far easier for organisations to do routine work faster, many were lagging behind on even the earlier digitisation wave, D4NP founder and former Google executive Abhinav Chetan said. | Photo Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto

Non-profits lag on technological maturity in India, a new report based on a survey of 500 organisations in the sector said. Even as white collar organisations employing college-educated workers experiment heavily with AI and integrate it into their workflows, non-profits did not score even 50% on digital maturity, even as they showed some interest in using large language models (LLMs) to help with reports and marketing, Delhi-based Digital for Nonprofits (D4NP) said in its State of Nonprofits Digitization Report 2026.

In any industry, D4NP founder and former Google executive Abhinav Chetan said, “nonprofits are always the last, no matter which technological trend you pick … They’re still experimenting. They’re still at level one, by the way — they’re only using it for conversations. They’re not really using it for complicated workflows.”

While AI systems have made it far easier for organisations to do routine work faster, Mr. Chetan said that many were lagging behind on even the earlier digitisation wave. One example the report cited was most organisations not taking advantage of monthly $10,000 ad grants. That came out to millions of dollars of free advertising money simply lying unused.

Of the twenty signals, only one organisation — Child Rights and You (CRY) — was on the right side of digital maturity. Mr. Chetan attributed CRY’s adoption of these tools to the corporate background of its staff. The digital maturity “percolates” due to this factor, Mr. Chetan said.

This doesn’t mean that organisations are not using AI tools at all. Quite the opposite, the report says, pointing out that the majority of Indian startups, six in ten, use at least one AI tool every day, and 85% use more than one AI tool. But on governance and taking advantage of emerging capabilities, most organisations did not score well.

Only roughly one in four startups had any safeguards for AI tools’ handling of sensitive personal data, and only one in four use online analytics tools (which, incidentally, have become easier to use with LLMs).

But the report marked a “median shift” to more adoption versus the previous year, when D4NP ran this survey last year, Mr. Chetan said. He added, “I wish they could even use it for coding — bring up a quick landing page, or create a dashboard… But that’s my sense for next year.”

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