AI is transforming Indian advertising. Can it say ‘Har Ghar Kuch Kehta Hai’?

Let’s start with what the Algorithm can’t create

Advertising has always run on story, and India’s most loved campaigns won on a deep read of people. Cadbury’s Kuch Meetha Ho Jaaye, Amul’s decades of topical wit, Asian Paints’ Har Ghar Kuch Kehta Hai and Surf Excel’s Daag Achhe Hain came from people who knew how an Indian family argues, hopes and forgives.

AI is now reaching into how those stories get made. It drafts headlines and creates scripts, images and voiceovers in seconds, tests a hundred variants at once, and localizes a campaign across 22 languages almost instantly. The speed is remarkable, and so is the risk.

At Cannes Lions, jurors have noted a similar pattern: AI-assisted entries surged, yet the work that truly moved the room remained overwhelmingly human. The best advertising says something unexpected about being alive, and algorithms, trained on what already worked, are built to avoid the unexpected.

If every brand prompts the same models on the same data, campaigns grow more efficient and more alike at once, and originality, the kind that can define a brand for a decade, gets optimized away. For India, the stake is higher still: a campaign that flattens the distance between a Chennai household and a Ludhiana one may test well… yet may connect with no one.

The optimists point out that every new tool has triggered the same panic. At a fashion-and-technology event during New York Tech Week, hosted by 99 Yards at Alameda NYC, Michael Ferraro, executive director of the Design and Technology (DTech) Lab at the Fashion Institute of Technology, made the case directly: photography has been reinvented many times before, and AI is simply the next tool in that lineage. AI is already helping designers work faster — minimizing waste, spotting errors earlier in the process, and building smarter, leaner production. Photography did not kill painting, and television did not kill radio; each tool widened the field.

The Vanishing Training Ground

AI is forcing agencies into their biggest restructuring in decades. Research that once took days now takes minutes, decks draft themselves, and first concepts appear before the brainstorm has properly started.

The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 expects 92 million roles displaced by 2030 and 170 million created, a churn equal to 22 percent of all jobs that pays off, if people retrain faster than it spreads. In advertising, the pain will fall hardest on entry and mid-level execution: junior copywriters, media planners, production coordinators, research analysts.

For India, where agencies employ thousands of young professionals and increasingly serve global clients, the impact is serious. If AI takes away the entry-level work that has always been the training ground, where will the next generation learn judgment, and who will the future leaders be, if they never get the formative reps that build instinct?

Prasoon Joshi, former CEO of McCann Worldgroup India, and one of the country's most creative minds, draws the line clearly. AI can reorganize what already sits in the data, he argued at India's AI Impact Summit in February 2026, but it cannot access what has not yet been expressed, and that is where human creativity lives. While AI can enhance productivity and enhance possibilities, it cannot replace the human capacity for revelation, judgement and values, according to Joshi.

As the domain continues to evolve, the job that changes most may be the CMO’s. Tomorrow’s chief marketing officer will look less like a brand leader and more like a chief growth and trust officer, owning customer experience, data strategy, AI governance and reputation at once. In a market drowning in machine-made content, advantage shifts decisively from execution to judgment.

As Sam Altman of OpenAI has argued, the winners will not be the firms that fire everyone and replace them with AI, but the ones that make their people far more effective. For Indian agencies, long used to competing on talent and cultural feel rather than scale, that is a more open door than it first appears.

The Rules Are Still Being Written

AI regulation is converging on a common principle across major markets: identifying the origin of content. In the United States, Tennessee's ELVIS Act, which took effect in July 2024, recognized a person's voice, including an AI-generated replica, as a protected property right. The federal TAKE IT DOWN Act, enacted in May 2025, made the distribution of non-consensual intimate deepfakes a criminal offense. The European Union has adopted the strongest transparency requirements. Its AI Act requires deepfakes to be labelled when the transparency provisions take effect in August 2026. The United Kingdom has taken a technology-neutral approach, with the Advertising Standards Authority issuing guidance on AI-generated content under existing rules.

India joined this global shift in early 2026 by notifying the Information Technology Amendment Rules. The rules introduced the country's first legal definition of synthetically generated information and require platforms to label AI-generated content, retain metadata that identifies its origin, and remove unlawful synthetic content promptly. The Advertising Standards Council of India has proposed a risk-based framework for labelling AI-generated advertising, and its influencer guidelines already require virtual influencers to disclose that they are not human.

The direction is clear. Regulators increasingly require audiences to know whether content was created by AI or by a person. For brands and agencies, transparent disclosure is now both a compliance requirement and a measure of credibility. Declaring clearly where AI ends and humans begin will treat disclosure as a brand asset, which is today’s equivalent of a quality seal.

Fifty Markets in One

For all the AI disruption, India enters this digital era with an advantage that may prove hard for any model to reproduce: cultural complexity. It is not one market but something closer to fifty. More than a billion people speak across 22 languages, numerous dialects and follow hundreds of traditions, and behavior shifts not just between States but between neighboring districts.

AI is good at finding patterns in old data and predicting the next likely move. Where it struggles is the lived experience underneath the pattern. It cannot feel why Navratri in Gujarat carries a different energy from Durga Puja in Bengal, read the weight a grandmother holds in a Rajasthani joint family, or grasp how meaning bends as the same line crosses Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam.

In the creator economy, where AI floods every feed and pushes synthetic influencers up the budget line, the winners will not be the creators who make the most content, but the ones who build the deepest relationship with an audience, the single thing a synthetic creator cannot fake.

The Last Human Task

America is showing the world, in real time, both the promise and the spoils of AI-powered advertising. The tools being tested there now, from synthetic influencers and digital twins to automated media buying and conversational commerce, will arrive in India at scale. The efficiencies will come, and so will the disruptions and the opportunities.

Machines have made marketing cheap to produce and easy to flood the world. What they have not made, and perhaps cannot, is the reason a consumer should believe you. What they cannot create is classic one-liners such as Daag Achhe Hain. These remain a task to be performed by humans, and in the age of artificial intelligence, it may prove the most valuable advantage of all.

That advantage rests on a clear division of labor. Artificial intelligence excels at basic, high-volume content, and it keeps getting faster at it. Where it falls short is the human part: empathy, original strategic thinking, the emotional read that tells you a line will work before anyone else sees it.

So if you write copy, direct creative, or build the visual world of a campaign, your work holds its value for now. Use the time well. Bring AI into your research, your idea generation, and your audience testing, let it handle the grunt work, and keep your own attention on the craft that persuades.

The transformative moment will arrive when AI learns to become human. That is when the farewells begin, the cake gets cut, and someone walks you warmly to the car park. Yet in the interest of the creative fraternity, we hope maverick techies will let it be… and avoid Prompts or refrain from LLM models that create an outcome akin to the dialogue below:

For which we return to the 1991 science fiction film ‘Terminator 2: Judgment Day,’ referred to in Part 1 of this article:

John Connor asks the Terminator: “Can you learn stuff you haven't been programmed with so you could be... you know, more human?”

(Renuka Naj, a New York-based writer with research, writing, and editing roles across US media, has served as a staff journalist at The Wall Street Journal.  She advises brands on deploying artificial intelligence in marketing and media. R. Chandra Mouli, former advertising professional based in Mumbai, serves as advisor to ad tech and martech enterprises. Views expressed are their own)