By Priye Choudhary
In today’s marketing departments, generative AI has become as common as mood boards and media plans. Need a tagline in three languages? Want to visualise a film idea in ten seconds? AI can deliver all that, faster than ever before. But amidst enthusiasm, there’s a growing recognition among brand leaders: AI can write your ad copy, but it still doesn’t understand your consumer.
Generative tools like ChatGPT, Midjourney, and others have transformed how marketing campaigns are developed. These tools enable teams to generate multilingual content, create instant visuals and video mock-ups, draft performance-driven copy with multiple CTAs, and optimise creatives using insights from A/B testing data. This has accelerated the creative process and improved the efficiency of content production.According to a 2025 report by the Indian Society of Advertisers (ISA), over 69% of large consumer brands in India have already integrated AI in their creative development or performance marketing workflows.
But ask any experienced brand manager and they’ll tell you: the best ideas don’t come from the prompt, they come from people.Consumer brands have long relied on in-house insight teams, behavioural psychologists, and ethnographic researchers to understand the deeper motivations behind purchase decisions. They observe how a homemaker in Vadodara stores her detergent, how a teenager in Jaipur shops for deodorants, or how a new parent in Nagpur chooses baby products.These aren’t insights mined from dashboards, they’re drawn from real-life interaction, observation, and emotion. AI might give you a grammatically perfect script. But it won’t know that an “ultra-hygienic” product may sound reassuring in Delhi but cold and clinical in Kochi.
India is a complex, high-context market. Tone, aspiration, trust, and humour vary sharply between Bengaluru and Bareilly, between an NCC cadet in Nagpur and a college fresher in Kochi. Generative AI is trained largely on existing content, data that is often global, urban, and overly generic. It still struggles with the socio-cultural subtext that makes Indian advertising resonate.
This isn’t to downplay AI’s role. AI can be a force multiplier for marketing teams, by speeding up content versioning across regions, generating creative for performance campaigns at scale and helping visualise early-stage ideas without lengthy briefs to agencies. But the creative edge, the reason a piece of communication moves people, will continue to come from lived experiences. AI can write a line. But it doesn’t know why a line works in Meerut and fails in Mangalore.
At the end of the day, AI can replicate content, not context. It can generate words, but not wisdom. And while it can deliver a line, only marketers can decide if that line will move hearts.
The author is marketing head, BirlaNu
