AI agents are redefining advertising ROI: When algorithms, not audiences, take charge

As India moves rapidly toward an AI-driven digital economy, a deep shift is underway in how brands earn consumer attention and influence purchase decisions. With AI agents increasingly integrating discovery, comparison, and purchase into a single automated process, traditional metrics such as impressions, clicks, and direct human attention are becoming less central to advertising strategies. Marketing effectiveness, long anchored in the visible signals of user behaviour, is increasingly being rewritten by machines that decide what consumers see, prefer, and eventually buy.

This is not a theoretical shift. New research shows that India is becoming one of the fastest adopters of agentic AI in the world. One in three Indian consumers already uses AI agents, and another 44 per cent expect to adopt them within the next year, outpacing the APAC average. These agents are no longer merely summarising content or drafting messages. They are acting on behalf of the user, comparing products, filtering options, surfacing deals, and even completing approved purchases.

With 73 per cent of Indian consumers relying on AI for shopping decisions which is significantly higher than regional benchmarks, the centre of gravity of advertising is tilting away from the human and toward the algorithm.

The question confronting brands today is stark, what happens to marketing ROI when the “customer” deciding what to buy isn’t a person, but an AI system optimised for relevance, accuracy, and trust rather than a glossy ad?

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A New Era of ROI: From Human Attention to Machine Trust

Marketers are entering a future where campaigns must perform in two parallel ecosystems: the human-visible layer and the agent-mediated layer. In this dual reality, traditional metrics remain important but increasingly insufficient to capture the full path to purchase.

Anindita Veluri, Director of Marketing at Adobe India, believes the shift demands a fundamental rethinking of value. “Traditional metrics like CPM or CTR will continue to play an important role but they will increasingly sit alongside newer signals that reflect how AI-guided experiences shape discovery and intent,” she says. Veluri describes the emerging model of ROI in two layers.

The first is what she calls Fundamental ROI which includes faster operations, cost optimisation, and reduced manual effort. The second, more transformative layer is Exponential ROI, where AI frees teams to experiment more, deliver additional initiatives, and unlock compounded creative and strategic potential. She adds that the true foundation of this shift is trust: “Agentic AI unlocks tremendous potential only when it is grounded in responsibility and transparency.”

As AI systems increasingly influence what consumers see first, the measurement paradigm shifts from counting views to assessing the quality and authenticity of brand experiences. The question evolves from how many people an ad reached to how meaningfully a brand communicates intent across machine-interpreted touchpoints.

Why Click-Based Marketing Is Losing Ground

The acceleration of agentic AI adoption in India reveals why traditional performance marketing is under pressure. Nearly three-quarters of consumers already use AI for shopping, 92 per cent rely on it for travel planning, and 49 per cent turn to it for financial tasks. These systems are not passive assistants. They filter information before a human sees it, often rewriting or summarising entire webpages, and in many cases completing actions autonomously.

This has led to a growing disconnect between what advertisers pay for and what actually influences buying decisions. As AI agents intercept search queries, evaluate product data, and deliver summarised recommendations, a substantial portion of India’s ad spend is failing to reach its intended audience.

Venkat Thangi, Senior Director of Marketing (Asia & ANZ) at MoEngage, notes that the era of what he calls “Vanity ROI” is ending. “When an AI agent is making purchase decisions on behalf of a human, it doesn’t get swayed by a flashy banner ad or a clickbait headline. It optimizes for utility, past experience, and verified value,” he says. This changes the performance equation entirely.

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According to Thangi, ROI will increasingly revolve around Customer Lifetime Value and Retention Velocity, as retention and acquisition collapse into a single predictive, value-driven model. He warns that brands with high churn will eventually be penalised by AI agents who read churn as a “quality failure” and gradually suppress the brand in recommendations.

Thangi estimates that 30–40 per cent of India’s current ad spend is wasted on what he calls “empty reach”. These are the ads that AI filters out long before they reach a human. The future, he argues, belongs to brands capable of hyper-personalized, real-time engagement that proves consistent value to both users and their AI agents.

The Rise of Algorithmic Visibility: Competing in the Machine Economy

If agentic AI is becoming the new gatekeeper, then brands must begin optimising not just for consumers, but for algorithms interpreting consumer intent. This requires a new category of metrics that track visibility, authority, and relevance in machine-readable contexts.

Siddhant Sethi, Senior Manager, Founder’s Office at White Rivers Media, believes the shift is already well underway. “The fundamental shift isn’t just about who makes the purchase decision. It’s about where brand influence actually happens,” he says. In an AI-filtered world, persuasion happens earlier, often before the human sees anything at all. Sethi points out that early implementations of shopping agents and comparison tools show how influence is increasingly upstream and machine-driven.

He estimates that around 40–50 per cent of purchase journeys in India will be influenced by AI agents by 2026. That, he argues, will force a redefinition of ROI around agent discoverability, contextual relevance, and multi-touch agent attribution. Sethi describes the current landscape as a “dual-reality world” where traditional dashboards capture only the human side of the journey, while a vast, invisible layer of machine-to-machine interactions decides brand outcomes in the background.

This shift also exposes inefficiencies in today’s ad spending. Sethi estimates that 20–25 per cent of search and display spend is already being wasted on impressions that AI systems intercept, rewrite, or compress into summaries, with users never clicking through. “Brands are paying for impressions that are being summarized away,” he says. As a result, the smartest advertisers are now creating agent-native content designed to be ingested and cited by AI systems, not just humans.

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A New Generation of AI Agents Reshaping Business and Consumer Life

As this shift unfolds, big technology companies are rapidly expanding their agentic AI capabilities, signalling how deeply these systems will be embedded in future customer journeys. Amazon recently introduced its Ads Agent skill for Amazon Marketing Cloud. The tool helps advertisers create analytics queries using natural language, translating business questions into SQL in minutes rather than hours.

Apple, Google, Samsung, Xiaomi, Vivo, Microsoft, Klarna, Atlassian, Infosys, TCS, HDFC Bank and ICICI Bank are all developing or deploying AI agents across devices, productivity tools, enterprise systems, fintech, and personalised consumer services. These agents are becoming the invisible operating system behind daily life from summarising notifications, booking restaurants and generating documents to handling compliance workflows, financial advice, predictive health alerts, and smart home automation.

The explosive expansion of the worldwide AI agents market, which increased from USD 5.43 billion in 2024 to USD 7.92 billion in 2025 and is expected to reach USD 236.03 billion by 2034, supports this quick adoption. Agentic AI is rapidly emerging as one of the biggest and fastest-growing technological categories, influencing customer expectations and altering corporate infrastructure across industries at a CAGR of 45.82%.

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The Future: When Machines Become the New Market Makers

As AI agents become central to how Indians discover, evaluate, and buy, advertising effectiveness will increasingly hinge on a brand’s ability to influence machines, not just people. Metrics like agent impression share, semantic authority, personalization precision, structured data completeness, and algorithmic affinity will become the new currency of marketing performance.

The shift may be challenging for marketers accustomed to dashboards focused on clicks and impressions, but it appears to be inevitable. In India, consumers are increasingly relying on intelligent systems to guide decisions, and these systems are becoming key intermediaries for trust, preference, and conversions. Brands that perform well in this environment will be those that align effectively with how these systems assess and prioritise content.