Sooraj Balakrishnan explains why brands must move from persuasion to participation, how AI search is changing product discovery, and why consumer understanding cannot be outsourced to machines.
Marketing's AI era has arrived with a paradox. Brands can create more content, personalise faster and automate customer interactions, but the same tools can flatten distinctiveness and distance marketers from consumers.
For Sooraj Balakrishnan, Head of Marketing at Acer for India and Bangladesh, the answer is not to resist technology. It is to prevent technology from replacing the fundamentals of marketing.
In an interview with Brij Pahwa, Editorial Lead, e4m and MartechAI.com, Balakrishnan spoke about the collapse of the linear marketing funnel, the growing influence of AI-generated recommendations, Acer's omnichannel business, the practical case for on-device AI, and the limits of deploying AI agents in customer service.
At the centre of his argument was a shift in the relationship between brands and consumers. “The shift is from persuasion to participation,” he said. Consumers, he argued, are “no longer a passive audience” receiving carefully controlled brand messages. They want to interact, review, co-create, offer feedback and influence how brands evolve.
That requires marketers to surrender some control. Instead of another orchestrated broadcast, brands need platforms where customers can shape experiences. Communities, user-generated content and feedback can create ownership and advocacy.
From funnels to Networks of Influence
Personalisation, in Balakrishnan's view, should reflect the consumer's current journey. Someone browsing travel content may find a message about a lightweight laptop and long battery life more relevant than a standard advertisement.
“It's not one-to-many, it's one-to-one,” he said, describing the direction in which marketers must move. But personalisation is only one part of the change. The path to purchase itself has become difficult to map.
In Acer's category, a buyer may discover a laptop through a creator, validate it through reviews, visit a store, compare prices on a marketplace and consult an AI assistant. Acer's sales contribution is approximately evenly divided between retail and e-commerce, according to Balakrishnan, although the mix varies by quarter.
He said Acer's D2C website can reach almost 20,000 PIN codes. Its ecosystem spans exclusive stores, large-format retailers, marketplaces and its own platform. E-commerce has not displaced physical retail. Consumers research online, inspect products in stores and buy wherever availability, experience, financing and price work best.
This makes the classic sequence of awareness, consideration, conversion and retention increasingly inadequate. “It's a network of influence,” Balakrishnan said. For marketers, “the task is not to control the sequence. It's to ensure the brand remains credible and easy to choose when the consumer enters the brand journey.”
The fragmentation also disrupts attribution. A conversion may be the visible endpoint of a decision shaped by creators, reviews, stores, marketplaces, brand communication and AI-led research.
Marketing to the Recommendation Engine
One of the newest challenges is that consumers are increasingly asking large language models which products to buy. For brands, visibility is no longer limited to a search-results page. It also depends on whether an AI assistant includes the brand in a short list of recommendations.
Balakrishnan said brands need generative engine optimisation that makes content useful and accessible to AI systems. Authority and trusted references remain relevant, but brands also need fresh, original material that answers consumers' questions instead of republishing AI-generated articles.
The sources influencing AI answers can extend well beyond a company's website. In Acer's case, he identified Reddit and technology publishers such as Digit, 91mobiles and MySmartPrice as important, while noting that sites such as Bajaj Finance can also surface prominently for laptop-related queries.
This creates a new form of discovery management. A strong product can still be absent from a consumer's consideration set if the content around it is weak. Balakrishnan nevertheless cautioned against depending exclusively on AI. Store experience, marketplace reviews and nearby support still matter.
AI's effect on creativity is more complicated. Generative tools can produce campaigns that look and sound alike, but Balakrishnan argued that AI can also improve consistency when trained on the correct brand identity, tonality and visual rules.
The problem begins when the technology assumes the role of strategist. “AI should not drive what you're doing. AI should be an enabler or a part of your campaign,” he said. Outsourcing creative thinking and problem-solving to a tool, he warned, can erode the judgement required to build a distinctive brand.
Where AI Helps, and Where Humans Remain Essential
For Acer, explaining AI is also a product-marketing challenge. Consumers may understand cloud-based AI services, but the benefits of AI processing built into a PC can appear abstract. Balakrishnan framed the proposition around two areas: cost and security.
He argued that on-device capabilities can perform some productivity, creative and optimisation tasks without consuming paid cloud tokens. He also positioned local processing as a way to keep more information on the device. Marketing must translate these capabilities into savings, privacy and everyday utility rather than use AI as product jargon.
Acer's marketing stack involves roughly three to four vendors rather than one end-to-end provider. Its tools cover analytics, campaign optimisation and delivery, e-commerce, social channels and contextual creativity. An open stack lets Acer evaluate new solutions in a rapidly evolving market.
One unresolved challenge is interpreting customer calls across India's languages and accents. Acer is exploring how AI can capture the tone of pre-purchase and post-purchase conversations and summarise feedback. Balakrishnan said the technology still struggles with the complexity of Indian speech.
His position on AI agents is similarly measured. Text-based agents, he believes, have progressed faster than voice-based systems. AI can handle simple enquiries, filter high call volumes and route complex cases to the appropriate human agent. It may also soften the impact of attrition in call centres. But technical products generate nuanced questions that machines may not yet handle well.
“As the complexity of the product you are selling is higher, I think human intervention is still required,” he said, adding that customer service “should not be completely handed over to an AI agent as of now.”
That boundary also shapes his view of marketing's future. AI and MarTech will become more prevalent, and agencies and brands will increasingly rely on them. But the marketer's first responsibility remains understanding the customer, the problem being solved, the relevant touchpoints and the message the brand should leave behind.
“Consumer understanding is something which should not be outsourced in AI,” Balakrishnan said. His advice is strikingly physical for an increasingly digital profession: go to a store, try selling a product, observe the pain points and experience the journey personally. Only then should technology be used to improve the campaign or customer experience.
The risk is not that AI will eliminate marketing overnight. It is that marketers may voluntarily give up the thinking that makes their role valuable. Balakrishnan's closing warning was directed particularly at those entering the industry: they should not believe “their job is just prompt managers” or become skilled at prompting without first learning the basics of marketing.
In an industry captivated by its newest tools, that may be the most important distinction. The future-ready marketer will know how to use AI, but will also know which parts of marketing must remain human.