Marketers must stop reporting and start deciding: Sowmya Iyer

At the e4m Martech AI Summit, Sowmya Iyer - Founder, DViO Digital, DViOone & Mesh AI, delivered a provocative session urging marketers to rethink their obsession with dashboards and vanity metrics. “Why must marketers stop reporting?” she began, acknowledging it sounded counterintuitive. “If you’re only reporting, where are the decisions coming from?”

Tracing DViO’s journey from a fast-scaling independent marketing-tech company to a global multi-country presence, Iyer said the biggest bottleneck in modern marketing is fragmented data. With brands running campaigns across Google, Meta, LinkedIn, affiliates, influencers and more, she noted that teams are drowning in native dashboards that don’t speak to each other. “Even with as many data analysts as you want, you do not fully understand the causal relationship between channels and your bottom funnel,” she said.

The problem, she added, becomes sharper when marketers present numbers that don’t matter to business leadership. “When you walk into the CEO’s office, CPM and CPR mean nothing. They want to know profit, ROAS, and where money is being left on the table.”

Iyer explained that this gap led to the development of DViO One (DViO1), a platform built over two years to unify marketing, CRM and sales data into a single operational layer. The idea, she said, was born from first-principles thinking. “We asked: can we talk to our data the way we chat with ChatGPT? It’s our data - why can’t it give us intelligence quickly?”

Demonstrating how DViO One works, Iyer showed how marketers can ask natural-language questions like “Which audience delivers the highest ROAS?” or “What happens if I move 30% budget from Google to Instagram?” and instantly receive multi-layered, AI-driven insights. “All of this happens in under five minutes, what hundreds of analysts could take weeks to do,” she said.

The platform also simulates budget reallocations and predicts bottom-line impact with confidence intervals. In one example, the tool identified the bottom 20% campaigns, recommended reallocation to the top performers, and instantly produced a projected revenue impact. “This is the power of chatting with your own data,” she said. “Zero additional spend required. Diminishing returns accounted for.”

Beyond performance optimisation, Iyer highlighted how DViO One maps competitor activity, analyses creative performance, and builds content calendars. “We’ve reimagined data analysis with AI. It’s built for marketers, with data science handled behind the scenes,” she said. Compliance, she stressed, is foundational. “It’s privacy-first, no personal identification. All data stays in your jurisdiction.”

The results, according to DViO, have been dramatic: 60-80% faster insights, 40% fewer operational hours, and 25% gains in media efficiency.

Looking ahead, Iyer said India must push harder to build world-class SaaS and Martech products. “Why should only global products dominate? We’re building products for the globe,” she said, emphasising DViO’s shift from agency roots to product innovation.

Ending her talk, Iyer reminded marketers that the future belongs not to those who report better, but those who decide faster. “Unify data. Keep the insights. And take decisions. That’s where high-impact performance truly begins."