Ericsson ConsumerLab expects daily use of AI across text, voice, images and video in India to rise from 22 percent today to 43 percent by 2030. The global projection for 2030 is 30 percent, up from 10 percent today, so India starts well ahead and is expected to stay there. The findings come from a survey of more than 43,000 smartphone users aged 15 to 69 across 27 markets. Ericsson stresses that the 2030 figures describe anticipated use, not current adoption.
AI is becoming a daily, mobile habit
The report’s central point is that AI is moving from the occasional query to constant use, across more devices and more places. Globally, daily multimodal use, multi-device use and the number of on-the-go locations where people use AI are each expected to triple by 2030. A small group sets the pace. AI “super users” are about 10 percent of consumers today. Ericsson expects them to reach 30 percent by 2030, while generating more than 80 percent of all AI activity.
Why the network feels it
When people share photos, video and voice with an AI service, data flows up from the phone rather than down to it. Ericsson expects traffic to become more upload-heavy and uneven, arriving in short bursts and concentrating where demand is already high. That raises the importance of responsiveness and uplink capacity. For super users, response time carries 2.5 times the weight in network satisfaction that it does for average users.
Nitin Bansal, Managing Director of Ericsson India, put it this way: “As AI becomes more multimodal and mobile, consumers will expect these experiences to work reliably across devices and wherever they are.”
Agents add background traffic and a trust question
Agentic AI is the next step. It completes tasks such as bookings, product comparisons and schedule management on a user’s behalf. Across the surveyed markets, 38 percent of smartphone users expect to use it by 2030, compared with 4 percent today, and they expect it to save about an hour of screen time a day. Ericsson notes that agents could create more background activity across apps, which raises the value of predictable performance, low latency and resilient connectivity.
Trust is the other side of that shift. More than half of daily AI users are strongly concerned about fake or hacked AI assistants. Among the players in the ecosystem, communications service providers rank as the most trusted to verify the identities of AI assistants.