Indian marketers are rapidly adopting artificial intelligence (AI) across creative, analytics, and customer journey functions, yet most organizations remain distant from achieving full AI maturity, according to the inaugural AI Marketing Maturity Study by MMA India, EY, and Mobavenue. Surveying over 60 senior marketing leaders across 11 sectors—including technology, media, FMCG, BFSI, real estate, and consumer products—the study shows AI has progressed beyond experimentation to deliver measurable business impact throughout marketing. However, a significant gap exists between AI adoption and AI maturity; most brands still rely on fragmented, standalone AI tools instead of integrated systems. Among AI adopters, 84% to 88% reported medium to high business impact across four key marketing areas: content and creative, measurement and insights, propensity modeling, and customer and sales journey management. Content and creative functions lead in AI sophistication, with about 35% of marketers achieving full-stack AI integration in creative workflows, while 65% continue using standalone tools. AI applications such as ad creation, video editing, multilingual content production, creative copywriting, blog generation, and audio creation have become widespread. Ad creation, video editing, and creative copywriting deliver the strongest business results, with over 90% of marketers noting medium to high impact. Marketers still largely depend on agencies and external technology partners for AI deployment; only around 20% are developing in-house capabilities in content and creative areas. Measurement and insights also receive significant focus, particularly for achieving real-time data visibility and unified reporting. Approximately 43% report full-stack AI integration here, and nearly 50% are investing in internal AI capabilities due to data’s sensitive nature. AI-driven report automation, campaign response analysis, sentiment evaluation, competitor tracking, and customer lifetime value modeling are increasingly common, with report automation and campaign analysis yielding strong outcomes. Propensity modeling serves as a clear maturity indicator: 57% of AI-using marketers report full-stack integration in acquisition propensity, upsell prediction, churn forecasting, cross-sell propensity, and next-best-action models. Nonetheless, nearly 48% have yet to apply AI in propensity modeling, making it one of the least mature areas. Among adopters, 88% report medium to high business impact. Adoption of AI in customer and sales journeys is growing, with 54% achieving full-stack integration while 46% experiment with standalone tools.

Use cases including AI-driven sales automation, ecommerce recommendations, predictive lead scoring, and inbound call routing are gaining traction. Yet real-time, integrated solutions like inbound call routing face adoption barriers due to operational and infrastructure challenges. Looking toward 2026, marketers prioritize improving content effectiveness (79%), media mix modeling (70%), and strengthening zero- and first-party data development (64%). Major challenges include ROI measurement, AI initiative integration, and building suitable martech stacks. Additionally, concerns remain around data privacy, ad fraud, cookie-less marketing, and increasing advertising costs. Industry leaders stress that the future marketing transformation hinges less on how many AI tools are used and more on the degree to which these tools integrate into business workflows. Raj Rishi Singh, CMO and CBO at MakeMyTrip, observes that Indian marketing progress is “uneven, ” with a widening divide between AI leaders and laggards. MMA India’s Country Head Moneka Khurana emphasizes that competitive advantage will come from connected AI ecosystems integrating insights, execution, and continuous learning—not siloed AI stacks. The report also highlights India’s growing role in the global AI landscape. In 2025, India represented 19% of the global user base for leading AI assistant apps, surpassing the U. S. at 10%. Nearly 80% of ChatGPT users in India are under 30, signaling rapid AI mainstream adoption among younger consumers. In conclusion, while AI adoption in Indian marketing is accelerating swiftly, achieving true maturity requires moving beyond fragmented efforts to developing connected, outcome-focused AI ecosystems.