MUMBAI: At the opening session of BNREW 2026 organised by WPP called ‘AI, AI Captain | What Can AI Do’ a question was asked about what are one or two things that marketers and professionals should do or should start doing immediately to win in the race of AI?
One answer is that they should start thinking systems basically more than processes. To make a creator better, one should design a system that can help you make it better. The question that you should be asking is what is the intelligence that is needed to make a creator better? And for that you need to connect an ecosystem that can help you. So think systems rather than thinking of process.
Marketers should also first start learning AI themselves and try and democratise it for their teams as much as possible. Celebrate the teams who are showing curiosity for learning AI and genuinely making use of it and get out of the whole jargonised way that this is only for tech people. It’s for everyone. It’s not a magic wand but if you don’t know it then you are living under a rock.
Mindset change is a very critical thing that every marketer will have to do starting from really senior folks who probably still think that AI is for document summary. It’s not for that. It’s a lot more. The shift will start top down.
The speakers were Benjamin Joy (Agency Lead, LinkedIn India)
Vishal Jacob (President – Choreograph, WPP Media), Deepa Jatkar
(India lead, WPP OpenDoor) Nikhil Kumar (Chief Growth and
Marketing Officer, India & Emerging Markets, Affle). The session moderator was Amin Lakhani President, Client Solutions, WPP Media South Asia)
Lakhani started by noting that any meeting, any conversation, any CEO speech that happens today mentions AI. Jatkar focusses on both building teams in office and building a basketball team over the weekends. She said that she does not like the word AI, which is artificial intelligence. When it is used by human beings, it ideally should be co-intelligence.
“So it is a tech power that is working alongside you. And the thumb rule should be that it has to be a human hand on the wheel all the time. AI can give you the signals, but it’s the human beings who have to decide what to do with those signals.”
AI she noted should be co-habiting with the ability to question and with the ability to power it with human intelligence. AI is a team mate to humans and the humans have to guide the team mate to give the right result. She noted that OpenDoor is an early adopter of WPP Open. “There’s a lot of work that happens, whether it’s workflows or unique pieces that we do with help of AI. So there are agents who are helping us mine consumer insights and give it to us at a scale and at a time which was humanly not possible earlier.
“Then there are people in our team who are working on competition scam. Reams and reams of data are being analysed and inferences are being made out of that. So there is your teammate which is helping you with scale and speed.
“But what to do with that? How to really harness the power of the insights that are coming out and then question it and then deploy it to the business outcome that you are aiming for is something that the humans will do. It’s almost a relationship. I’m a teammate to AI where I’m guiding that teammate to give me the right result and then questioning if the result is as per what my outcome expectation is.
“I don’t know if the coaching analogy exactly fits in perfect here, but it always has to be a teammate where you have to guide and you have to coach and you have to make sure that you are powering it as opposed to the other way around.
And for that what is required is that you have to zoom out a little bit and not black box it and think that this is going to be the be all and end all of everything. You have to keep your critical thinking you know filter always sort of up and then you have to ensure that it’s delivering you what you really need as far as your business outcome is concerned in a business context.”
Scale and speed is what AI gives you. “The ability to drive it, that hand on the wheel has to be human. So you are the coach and this is a teammate that can do wonders for you if you know how to harness the skill of that teammate.”
Joy spoke about the growing importance of LLMs and the fact that Linkedin is cited a lot by them when users use LLMs for product discovery. “When it comes to LinkedIn as a platform, there is AI across multiple positions in LinkedIn from your mainstream campaign optimisation, the entire execution piece, which is of course very mainstream and it’s already happening and there are obviously many tools which can help enable that. Then there is the content piece as to how content is changing on the platform.
He noted that today consumers are rushing to AI and LLMs to search for things even before they get to a brand’s website, before they see the influencers even a brand’s paid campaign. “People are asking which is the best 50 lakh sub SUV? Which is the holiday I can take on the next weekend? And these are questions which they are asking to an AI and the answer is being framed in the AI ecosystem.
“LinkedIn is currently the second most cited domain across all major AI platforms. Which means that every content that you put on the platform carries much more credibility and it is being used in answering questions which are being posed by the audiences. Which means that your brand needs to put up content which is more authentic.
“There needs to be a voice in your company and you are representing your brand who is consistently doing this on the platform in the most authentic manner not just random posting of content so that it can help being fed into AI-like question when someone puts a discovery question like a new category. If you are a new entrant he wants to search something your answer is going to pop up there. So it is even more important that you frame your content which falls within the AI search engine and for that it needs authenticity and perspective.”
Jacob noted that we have not yet entered the era of zero human intervention when it comes to the use of AI. “We have got a long way to go before it comes to zero human intervention. We are probably in a connected ecosystem. You have organisations which have data that is sitting with different departments of the organisation. You will have a CRM team that is sitting with their existing loyalty customers. You will have an e-commerce team that is looking at your acquisition data. You have a media marketing team that is looking at marketing level data.
“But there is no universal context layer that connects all these data together. And if we need to move into an autonomous system then there has to be something called a UCP or universal context interface where you can connect the data together. And that system thinking is currently still a long way to go in most organisations.
“And it needs a bit of thinking for the organisations per se. The short answer is no. But the good news though is that there are a lot of universal protocols in place that are coming in place. There is MCP – model context protocol. There is universal e-commerce protocol. There is universal app protocol. All these protocols, universal app protocol, universal language is basically connecting data together and gives similar context. It’s basically moving the industry in that direction. But I think it will take at least two to three years (11:45) before we see zero human interaction.”
Kumar noted that AI is a reality. His company’s 10x vision is actually built on AI powered consumer intelligence. “We have always advocated very thoughtful, verticalized, vernacular India and emerging market approach. Sticking to AI, Affle has filed over 39 file patents, 18 Have been granted. And some of it dates back to 2019. Some of our AI led patents predate Gen AI by almost 2-3 years.”
He gave three specific examples. One is about fraud prevention in ad dollars given that multiple AI agents talk to each other. There is so much conversation about AI. AI can create content, create multiple sets of creative, can automate tasks. But what will be the impact of it exactly 24 months from now. For every human that is joining the internet it is bringing along at least 10-14 automated agents to act on its behalf.
“Whether it’s on commerce, quick commerce, banking. there are agents that you are bringing with you at any given point of time. Now agents are being automated to take decisions on your behalf as well. We are entering that era.
Very soon the reality will be that this is great content and we have been discussing that a lot but who is exactly consuming this content? Where are the ad dollars that are actually paid by the advertisers going to? I think one of the technologies that we have invested in is creating that fraud prevention.
“There are so many agents talking to agents at any given point of time that you are really not exactly knowing who is the ad being served to. And we have always focused on very performance skewed, cost per converted user kind of metric which makes it absolutely imperative for us to solve that. Otherwise we are not going any forward. One of our patents is around that.”
Secondly he spoke about a certain patent recently granted called Maximise User Awareness which is solving a basic cliche problem of frequency capping. “We are all marketers. But at the end of the day, with so many walled gardens not talking to each other, the consumer is the same guy with frequency capping being applied across many diversities to the same user. Now we have obviously built a layer of AI which is able to understand the exposure of ads to a particular user in a certain way thereby ensuring reduced exposure from our ecosystems to that particular user.”
The aim is to show an ad to a user who has not seen as many ads in a year, thereby increasing his priority call and thereby also his engagement. “We have seen great success in that. Third, is agentic agents. We have a platform called Newton which powers iOS app roles and we have deployed two agents which seamlessly talk to each other. One is Optics, which is a creative agent and Niko, which is an agentic agent. Now, the dashboard is becoming an agent where Optics is trading 1,000 creatives within 30 seconds absolute marketer diversity specific to content optimising for best outcomes and it is talking to an agent which is actually driving performance at scale.
“And both the live results are flowing into both these agents at the same time. And now they are not working autonomously, they are talking to each other thereby driving the end outcome for the user. Again, 95% automated, 5% the client still decides whether he wants 100% automation or not. We are moving at a very, very fast pace.”
India he added is the second largest user of Gen AI. 100 million users by the end of 2025 came on these Gen AI platforms daily. “AI is a part of our daily lives across commerce, food delivery, etc. We have to come to terms with how we are dealing with AI and how much are we dealing with it.”
Jacob was asked if AI is going to take all this heavy lifting of production, automation this means drudgery of our jobs is somehow getting taken care of by the technology. Does this mean that finally people or units in companies, or marketers can focus on taste, strategy, higher-order decision-making? Or is it a myth? Which one of these is true?
Jacob said, “If you look at marketing per se, this is my philosophy, it’s always been about a human-to-human relationship. But for the first time now we have a human-to-machine relationship. And this human-to-machine relationship is probably one relationship that’s going to prevail in the future. So it will be interesting to see how humans interact with machines to understand humans better.”
The relationship that humans have with machines is something that every individual should ponder on. And it should try and be a one-way relationship. So if you have a one-way relationship with a machine that you manage the machine to serve yourself, then it’s great.
But he warned that if you have a machine that starts managing you, then that’s a bit of a problem. “That’s my fundamental view. That if you look into the future, and if you feel that you want to live a life which is governed by machines, then that’s up to you.
“But if you want to live a life where you govern the machines, then that’s up to you. It’s a personal choice that you want to make.”
