Indian CMOs are abandoning the old “Franken-stack” of piecemeal martech tools and transitioning into orchestration strategists. Today’s marketing chief is less an in-house developer and more an architect who integrates AI-driven, no-code platforms. The catalyst is clear: budgets are flat or shrinking (over 40% of CMOs report flat or smaller budgets) even as demands for ROI surge. At the same time, India’s digital footprint is exploding – the country’s digital ad market is projected to hit $32.33 billion by 2030, growing over 15% per year – and consumers expect hyper-personalized experiences. Put simply, India’s new CMO must “do more with less,” delivering millions of micro-personalized interactions by wiring together best-of-breed AI tools rather than building custom code. As Simpl cofounder Nitya Sharma observes, modern Indian marketing leaders “don’t just market to consumers – you educate, build habits, and create trust – all at once”.
This shift from build to orchestrate has been quietly enabled by two forces: AI and low-code platforms. Generative AI and marketing automation engines now allow non-technical marketers to deploy complex campaigns in hours. By 2025, roughly 70% of new enterprise applications will use no-code or low-code tools. In practice, this means the CMO’s focus moves from overseeing developers to curating modular solutions. For example, instead of commissioning an agency to code a custom email drip from scratch, an Indian team might plug data into an AI-driven personalization engine and drag-drop a workflow in a no-code dashboard. The result is agility: campaigns that once took months can be iterated in days. A recent study of Indian CMOs found that 63% agree generative AI’s value lies in proprietary data, yet only 1% of enterprise data is tapped. In other words, CMOs are racing to stitch together data platforms and AI agents to automatically trigger the “next best action” in real time. As one industry analyst puts it, the invisible infrastructure of today’s campaigns is a “sophisticated orchestration of data and AI, identity resolution, behavioral insights, real-time decisioning and content generation” – all interoperating seamlessly to deliver the right offer at the right moment.
Several contextual factors make India fertile ground for this transformation. Its massive population of 1.4 billion and surging internet adoption mean any campaign must scale wildly. As HCLSoftware’s Rajesh Iyer notes, “we have a bank that holds 780 million active records” in its customer data platform, running multi-channel campaigns across 28 states and multiple languages. Only an intelligence-economy approach, not a piecemeal stack, can handle that complexity. India’s youth-driven demographics and vernacular diversity also favor AI-powered solutions. Indian D2C brands are using generative AI to create region-specific content and vernacular chatbots, while new voice-commerce platforms in local languages are extending reach into non-metro markets. The country’s rapid digitalization, from UPI payments to ONDC e-commerce, provides a data and infrastructure backbone that global marketers envy. Even connected TV has taken off: over 50 million Indian households now stream video on demand, turning the living room into the new marketing frontier.
Meanwhile, Indian companies are rethinking org charts. Marketing is no longer siloed. Modern CMOs often carry titles like Chief Growth Officer or Chief Brand Officer, and sit in the boardroom alongside product and finance. They must speak the language of data as fluently as brand. As Simpl’s Nitya Sharma puts it, today’s CMOs “understand that in India’s diverse market, you don’t just market to consumers – you educate, build habits, and create trust – all at once”. This broader remit, part psychologist and part data scientist, means CMOs are orchestrating the customer journey end-to-end. A plurality of Indian CMOs now focus on customer experience, scalability and tech modernization as top priorities. Yet few have all the in-house expertise: just 26% have prepared their teams for AI agents, and only 26% feel they have the right talent to meet their AI goals. The gap is spurring CMOs to partner with cross-functional colleagues and rethink processes. A marketing campaign might now involve product, IT and even operations teams coordinating via no-code integration platforms.
Organizational enablers are emerging. Indian firms are building marketing operating systems rather than islands of tools. ITC has deployed a central “Sixth Sense” data hub that maps consumer behavior and crafts personalized messages using AI. B. Sumant of ITC says the company has accelerated the adoption of digital technologies, including AI, to make the business a data-driven, intelligent enterprise. Hindustan Unilever similarly reports AI-powered analytics at each step of marketing, from media planning to content generation. Its platforms crunch terabytes of data to optimize media campaigns via AI-driven market-mix modeling, ensuring marketers know exactly which channels and audiences deliver ROI. On the content side, consumer data platforms and AI-powered content supply chains use millions of past interactions to build virtual consumer profiles and generate tailored messages at scale. In practice, this means a single brand can now auto-personalize millions of ad variations for different segments in real time, a job once impossible to do manually.
Indian tech vendors are racing to meet this need with pre-built AI agents and integration layers, but the real credit goes to brand marketers who adapt them strategically. Bajaj Finserv, for example, uses third-party AI tools to deliver credit-card offers on the fly based on real-time transaction data. Retailers are deploying store Wi-Fi and apps that feed behavioral data into marketing clouds, often handled by cross-departmental growth squads instead of just the marcom team. Quick-commerce apps have built in-house marketing engines to send push notifications for daily essentials at precise moments. Zepto’s chief brand officer notes they deploy interactive alerts and festive campaigns dozens of times a month to stay top-of-mind.
The industry impact is already visible. In BFSI, HDFC Bank’s Group Head and CMO Ravi Santhanam describes their approach as building experience engines. Instead of crafting a few one-off ads, HDFC’s team now automates personalized journeys at scale. Santhanam says the bank’s AI-driven offer engines generate around 1.35 million unique content pieces across credit cards, loans and other products, something impossible to do manually. His team built QR-linked workflows so that a customer scanning a bank QR code gets a custom offer, while the relevant relationship manager sees the same information instantly, aligning digital and offline channels seamlessly. Santhanam emphasizes that such capabilities require strong data rails. “If you don’t have clean data, build it. If you don’t have the rails, you cannot solve the problem,” he warns. By automating basic tasks, HDFC aims to have 25% of product sourcing done without human intervention, leaving people free to focus on strategic problems. As Santhanam puts it, the future of marketing is dynamic, AI-powered systems. “We must build not just brand engines, but experience engines,” he told the MarTechAI Summit.
In FMCG, the trend is similar. Indian giants like ITC, Marico, Dabur and Hindustan Unilever have unleashed AI across marketing and operations. Marico used search trends to launch a new onion-oil under the Parachute brand when interest spiked, and also offers an AI skin-analyzer on its website to recommend products. Across the board, FMCG CMOs are moving away from spray-and-pray campaigns. They now routinely use AI to predict demand and tailor communications. Marketing leaders say AI-driven market-mix models and content generators help identify hidden patterns in consumer media consumption so brands can reach the right audience on the right channels at the right frequency. This data-centric approach lets brands maintain consistent narratives while customizing the details for each city or language.
Indian e-commerce and retail firms are likewise on board. Flipkart and Amazon India are embedding AI into email and push programs, auto-generating tens of thousands of product recommendations per customer. Local D2C players rely on automated workflows in CRM systems to onboard customers and trigger loyalty offers without manual coding. Even startups are getting in on it. One fintech founder notes that smaller teams often prefer a full-stack marketer who can stitch together tools, but as these founder-operators grow, they pivot to specialized growth teams and AI tools. “A Swiss Army marketer can help early on, but nothing beats the right tool for the right task,” he says.
The upshot is a profound reimagining of marketing leadership. Modern Indian CMOs must combine creative vision with data literacy and tech savvy. They spend less time drafting code or emailing agencies, and more time defining strategy, selecting platforms and orchestrating AI agents. Indian marketers are focusing on future-readiness pillars like customer experience and tech modernization, yet very few have fully prepped their organizations for AI agents. This gap is opening opportunities for citizen marketers who can navigate no-code interfaces, and for partnerships with in-house analytics teams. One executive notes that small Indian enterprises are demonstrating that size does not limit innovation or growth, and that any firm can scale more efficiently by adopting AI-driven solutions like autonomous agents that provide personalized customer experiences. In practice, this means the marketer’s toolbox is now an integrated ecosystem.
Consider the gains. Early adopters see order-of-magnitude productivity improvements. Indian brands report cutting content creation cycles from weeks to hours and shaving development costs by 20 to 40% by relying on pre-built platforms. Orchestrated systems also reduce waste, as campaigns can automatically self-optimize and fine-tune marketing spend in real time. CMOs liken it to playing a T20 cricket match rather than a test match. Every ball, or every ad impression, matters and is analyzed. In India’s highly competitive FMCG and retail markets, even a few percentage points of extra efficiency can mean crores in savings.
Looking ahead, the zero-stack approach only promises to deepen. As AI agents become more autonomous, Indian marketers will increasingly supervise workflows rather than execute them. This is already happening in narrative creation, with generative AI drafting entire social posts and enabling teams to iterate content ten times faster. Voice and vernacular AI are expanding campaigns into rural and non-English segments, with chatbots now conducting conversations in dozens of Indian languages without extra coding. On the data side, India’s digital public infrastructure could eventually feed into more advanced personalization models without violating privacy norms.
The bottom line is that India’s brand marketers are evolving with the times. The full-stack era, where CMOs built custom martech stacks from scratch, is giving way to an orchestration era. As Nitya Sharma puts it, today’s CMOs are thinking beyond single campaigns to owning the brand’s narrative at scale. They judge agencies not by how many banners they produce, but by how effectively they integrate AI-powered insights and unified tech platforms. And they measure success not in clicks alone, but in sustained customer relationships.
In short, India’s next-generation CMO is orchestrator-in-chief: a strategic conductor connecting data, AI and channels to create harmonious customer experiences. The signals are clear, from stalwarts like HDFC Bank to agile startups, that those who master this orchestration will win the race. As the marketing profession transforms, one thing is certain: India’s CMOs who build experience engines, not just campaigns, will lead the pack.
Disclaimer: All data points and statistics are attributed to published research studies and verified market research. All quotes are either sourced directly or attributed to public statements.