Describing it as the “illusion of transformation” versus the “reality of transformation”, Mark Abraham, Managing Director & Senior Partner and Global Leader, Marketing, Sales & Pricing Practice at BCG, said many companies have moved beyond experimenting with AI, but relatively few have translated those efforts into measurable business impact or autonomous marketing operations.
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Jasmine Pithawala, India Leader, Marketing, Sales and Pricing Practice at BCG, said the disconnect is even sharper in India. While Indian CMOs are investing aggressively in AI and remain highly ambitious about its adoption, fewer have moved beyond pilots to deploying autonomous agents, with or without human assistance, than in other markets.
“The gap between illusion and reality is even larger in India than it is in the global markets,” Pithawala said.
BCG’s latest global CMO survey found that companies making the fastest progress have moved beyond isolated AI pilots by redesigning workflows, investing in data and martech, building brand guardrails into AI systems and upskilling employees, while others remain stuck in experimentation despite strong AI adoption.
The executives said AI adoption remains in its early stages despite rapid experimentation.”We are just scratching the surface of the art of the possible,” Abraham said, pointing to the emergence of what he described as “truly agentic native brands”. He said the time taken to build a brand from zero to a couple of hundred million dollars in revenue, which had already shrunk from five years to a few years, could now be reduced to “months”.
Abraham said marketing organisations are also likely to undergo significant change. Instead of organising teams around channels such as email, social media and the web, companies will increasingly move towards “multi-channel creative technologists”, with marketers spending more time on strategy and less on manual execution.
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He also argued that AI has increased, rather than diminished, the importance of brands.
“The importance of the brand has gone up,” Abraham said.
He said companies making the fastest progress are building a “brand intelligence layer” by codifying brand guardrails, trusted data sources and quality checks into their AI systems. In one client engagement, AI-generated outputs were initially accurate less than half the time. After the brand intelligence layer was introduced, accuracy rose to about 80%, encouraging marketers to adopt the tools.
From an India perspective, Pithawala said AI is being deployed primarily to drive growth.
“In India, honestly, it is more of a growth story than a cost efficiency story,” she said, pointing to investments in agentic commerce and personalisation.
She also said Indian consumers are increasingly discovering brands through large language models (LLMs).
“Consumers are now discovering brands on LLMs,” Pithawala said. “If consumers are on AI, then there’s no option for the brands but to be on AI in the right manner.”
Abraham said AI is also changing how marketing teams work with technology teams. Rather than marketing defining requirements and technology implementing them, technologists are becoming more deeply embedded within marketing functions, while martech teams are increasingly helping shape technology roadmaps.
Both executives said companies are investing heavily in upskilling existing marketing teams and experimenting with new AI tools as they prepare for wider adoption.