Indian PR Industry Grows Eleven Percent To Rs 3230 Crore Capturing 12.6 Percent Of Asia Pacific Market
India’s public relations industry grew 11 percent to Rs 3,230 crore in FY26, now commanding 12.6 percent of the Asia Pacific market, as government and startup clients reshape a sector quietly shifting from communications support into genuine boardroom strategy.
Highlights:
- India’s PR industry grew 11 percent year on year to Rs 3,230 crore in FY26
- The country now accounts for 12.6 percent of the entire Asia Pacific PR market
- Government clients have nearly tripled their share of PR spending since 2022
- Startup clients have nearly quadrupled their share of the industry over the same period
- AI investment by PR firms has more than tripled, from 2 percent to 7 percent of revenue
There is a particular kind of growth story that looks unremarkable on the surface and only becomes interesting once you look at who is actually driving it. India’s public relations industry has just delivered exactly that kind of story. According to the newly released SPRINT 2026 report from the Public Relations Consultants Association of India, the country’s PR industry grew 11 percent year on year in FY26 to reach Rs 3,230 crore, and in doing so, now accounts for 12.6 percent of the entire Asia Pacific PR market. On paper, an 11 percent growth rate sounds solid but unspectacular. Underneath it, though, sits a genuinely significant reshuffling of who buys PR, why they buy it, and how central the discipline has become to how companies and governments actually operate.
The report itself was prepared by global research firm Ipsos in partnership with PRCAI and Astrum Reputation Advisory, drawing on responses from 143 senior decision makers across PR consultancies and corporate communications teams. Its headline finding is that India’s PR industry is projected to reach Rs 4,500 crore by 2030, continuing a growth trajectory that has held for over a decade. But the report is careful to frame this year’s 11 percent growth as a moderation from the industry’s decade long compound annual growth rate of 12 percent, and it frames that moderation not as a warning sign, but as evidence of a maturing industry, one where the story is no longer simply about how fast revenue is growing, but about how the underlying mix of clients, priorities, and technology is shifting beneath that headline number.
The most striking shift documented in the report concerns exactly who is paying for PR services in India today. Government clients have nearly tripled their share among the industry’s top client categories, rising from just 4 percent in 2022 to 11 percent in 2026. At the same time, startups have grown their share even more dramatically, expanding from 6 percent to 22 percent over the same four year window, nearly quadrupling their presence in the client mix. This growth has not come without cost to the industry’s traditional base. Private corporates, long described as the mainstay of Indian PR spending, saw their share slip from 48 percent to 42 percent across the same period. Read together, these numbers describe an industry whose centre of gravity is visibly moving, away from the large, established corporate accounts that once defined the profession, and toward government communications on one end and fast growing young companies on the other, two client types with very different needs, timelines, and appetite for risk.
There is also a broader strategic elevation happening within how PR itself is perceived inside client organisations. The report finds that PR’s share of overall marketing budgets rose from 12 percent in FY25 to 14 percent in FY26, a meaningful jump in a single year for a discipline that has historically had to fight for budget attention against advertising and digital marketing. More than half the professionals surveyed, 53 percent, said PR is actively gaining budget share specifically from advertising and digital agencies, while 58 percent said the function is expanding into what the report calls marketing performance outcomes, territory that was traditionally the domain of performance marketing teams rather than communications professionals. Nearly half of communicators surveyed, 46 percent, said PR now directly influences business outcomes at their organisations, and more than 40 percent reported that chief executives are increasingly turning to communications advisers for strategic counsel rather than purely reactive media management.
Artificial intelligence threads through almost every part of this year’s findings, and the numbers around its adoption are genuinely dramatic. AI investment among Indian PR firms has more than tripled over the past three years, climbing from just 2 percent of revenue to 7 percent, with respondents expecting that figure to reach 10 percent within the next three years. The specific ways AI is being used reveal a discipline still finding its footing with the technology rather than having fully settled into a mature workflow. Research and intelligence gathering is the single most common AI use case, cited by 77 percent of respondents, followed by written content creation at 73 percent, meeting summaries and note taking at 66 percent, and visual content, ideation, and content versioning each cited by 55 percent of respondents. Investment priorities, however, vary quite noticeably depending on the size of the firm. Around 90 percent of mid sized firms identified training and upskilling their own staff on AI tools as their single top priority, suggesting real anxiety about internal capability gaps. Among emerging, smaller firms, 78 percent prioritised AI powered creative tools specifically, while 65 percent focused on adopting third party platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot directly into daily workflows. Larger firms told a somewhat different story, with 68 percent prioritising AI driven data analytics and 73 percent focusing on broader staff upskilling, suggesting the biggest players are trying to build more systematic, data heavy AI capability rather than simply layering generative tools onto existing processes.
Kunal Kishore, who serves as president of PRCAI, described this year’s findings as evidence that there is no longer a single story defining the Indian PR industry, but several stories diverging rapidly from one another, and argued that the profession must sharpen its strategic capabilities and adopt emerging technologies responsibly if it wants to reinforce its position as a trusted business partner rather than a purely tactical service provider. He added that the profession is undergoing a broader transformation touching skills, structures, and self perception all at once, a framing that captures the report’s overall tone fairly well, cautious optimism about growth paired with genuine uncertainty about exactly what shape the industry will take as AI adoption deepens and the client base keeps shifting.
It is worth reading these numbers with a measure of professional scepticism rather than pure celebration, particularly given that this report is produced by the industry’s own trade association working with a research partner, which is not unusual for sector reports of this kind but is still worth flagging as context. A rising share of government clients, while good news for agency revenue, also raises fair questions about the kind of work that revenue represents, government communications work often skews toward image management and public messaging around policy rather than the more independent, reputation building work PR firms have traditionally positioned themselves around, and a heavier reliance on government contracts can expose agencies to political cycles and shifting administrative priorities in ways that private corporate relationships generally do not. Similarly, while the near quadrupling of startup clients is a genuinely positive signal about the health of India’s broader entrepreneurial ecosystem, startup PR budgets tend to be smaller and less stable than established corporate retainers, meaning this growing slice of the client base may add more volume than durable, high value revenue to agency books.
The AI adoption numbers deserve a similarly balanced read. Tripling AI investment as a share of revenue in just three years is a genuinely fast pace of change for a services industry that has historically been slow to adopt new technology, and the finding that AI is now most heavily used for research and content creation suggests the technology is being absorbed into existing workflows rather than replacing the fundamentally relationship driven, judgment heavy nature of PR work itself. But the sharp divergence in AI priorities between large firms focused on data analytics and smaller firms focused on ready made creative tools also hints at a widening capability gap that could reshape competitive dynamics within the industry over the next few years, larger firms with more resources to build proprietary AI capability may pull further ahead of smaller boutique agencies that can only access the same off the shelf tools everyone else is using. Taken as a whole, the SPRINT 2026 report describes an industry that is genuinely growing and genuinely changing at the same time, which is precisely what makes moderating headline growth, in this case, a sign of health rather than concern, provided the deeper structural shifts underway are managed as thoughtfully as the report’s own tone suggests the industry hopes they will be.
