Is AI becoming CMO's best employee in FMCG?

New Delhi: Artificial intelligence has moved from the innovation lab into the heart of marketing at India's largest consumer goods companies. The shift isn't about replacing creative agencies or marketers. It is about removing the guesswork from marketing. Over the past year, companies such as Hindustan Unilever (HUL), Marico, Colgate-Palmolive India, Dabur and Godrej Consumer Products (GCPL) have steadily moved AI from isolated pilots to core marketing functions. Furthermore, several of them have built their own in-house AI platforms rather than relying solely on third-party tools, signalling that artificial intelligence is becoming a long-term competitive capability rather than a temporary productivity hack. The common objective isn't to make advertisements with AI. It is to make better marketing decisions. Every FMCG company now wants its own AI brain One of the biggest shifts underway is the emergence of proprietary AI platforms that sit at the centre of marketing operations. HUL's Sangam is one such example. The platform uses market-mix modelling to analyse vast volumes of consumer, media and business data before recommending how advertising budgets should be deployed across channels. Instead of evaluating campaigns after they end, Sangam helps marketers optimise investments while campaigns are still running. But Sangam doesn't work in isolation. It connects with Shikhar, HUL's eB2B platform that gives real-time visibility into retailer demand, while initiatives such as Samadhan and Nano DC link marketing with warehousing, logistics, and replenishment. GCPL has taken a similar path. Its in-house platform MASH has become the backbone of media planning, helping optimise advertising spends across an increasingly fragmented media landscape. At the same time, AI powers distributor replenishment, route planning, assortment recommendations, shelf monitoring and demand forecasting, bringing marketing, sales and supply chain onto the same technology backbone. Dabur is following a similar strategy by institutionalising AI within its Digital Marketing GCC. According to its Integrated Annual Report 2025–26, the centre will build MarTech platforms, in-house digital applications and intelligent automation tools to improve campaign effectiveness. AI will power audience segmentation, content intelligence, automated insights, unified dashboards, benchmarking frameworks, attribution models and real-time performance visibility, giving marketers a single decision-making layer across brands and markets. Content production is moving at internet speed The impact of AI is perhaps most visible in creative production. Marico has embedded AI across consumer research, communication development, product innovation and content creation. Marketing projects that previously required months to complete can now move from concept to execution within weeks using AI-assisted workflows. The company also believes consumers are gradually shifting from traditional search engines towards AI-assisted discovery, making it essential for brands to rethink how they remain visible in digital environments. Colgate-Palmolive India is solving a different problem. Instead of relying entirely on conventional product photography, it has built an AI-powered content engine that generates digital product assets for e-commerce platforms. As brands now require hundreds of images across multiple marketplaces and formats, AI is helping reduce production costs while significantly improving speed. Dabur is also centralising intelligent content creation through its upcoming Digital Marketing GCC. The company has already begun experimenting with AI-led creative production. Dabur Amla's Teacher's Day campaign used a fully AI-generated video alongside a personalised microsite, supported by influencer amplification and a network of nano creators to drive reach and engagement. Consumer insights no longer arrive months later Perhaps the most important change AI is bringing is in consumer understanding. Earlier, marketers depended on research reports, surveys and focus groups to understand consumer behaviour. Today, AI analyses search trends, retail sales, promotions, weather patterns, pricing movements and digital interactions almost instantly. GCPL's machine-learning models combine factors such as seasonality, weather, competitive activity and promotions to improve forecasting accuracy. At Colgate, AI and analytics are helping improve forecasting while strengthening consumer engagement across digital channels. Marico is using AI to speed up consumer insight generation and improve decision-making, while HUL has embedded AI across consumer, customer and operational ecosystems to enable faster responses to market changes. Marketing is gradually moving from hindsight to foresight. AI doesn't stop at the advertisement GCPL's AI ecosystem illustrates this shift well. Its route optimisation tools guide more than 3,000 sales representatives serving over one million retail outlets. AI also recommends the right product assortment for individual stores, while image-recognition technology checks whether products are displayed correctly on shelves. HUL's retail platforms similarly provide real-time visibility into demand across millions of retail touchpoints. Marico, meanwhile, views quick commerce as more than another sales channel. Faster delivery cycles are changing consumer behaviour itself, making replenishment quicker and increasing purchase frequency. Dabur's Digital Marketing GCC is being planned alongside its already operational IT GCC, which supports enterprise systems, data and analytics, AI and business transformation. Together, the two centres are expected to connect marketing technology with wider business operations, enabling greater agility and globally benchmarked execution across functions. In all these cases, marketing is no longer measured only by awareness or engagement. Success increasingly depends on whether products are available at the right place, at the right time. The creator economy is making AI indispensable The rise of influencer marketing has created another challenge for FMCG companies. Managing campaigns involving thousands of creators across multiple languages, regions and platforms has become too complex for manual planning. Marico's latest shampoo campaign, for instance, involves collaborations with more than 3,000 creators, ranging from celebrity influencers to regional nano and pico creators. AI is increasingly helping brands identify the right creators, understand audience overlaps, personalise communication and measure campaign effectiveness across platforms. As digital media becomes the dominant advertising channel for many FMCG brands, AI is emerging as the glue holding these fragmented ecosystems together. What about the marketer's role? Despite the rapid pace of adoption, none of these companies sees AI as a replacement for marketers. Algorithms can identify patterns, optimise media, generate creative variations and forecast demand. They cannot understand cultural nuance, build emotional brands or create enduring consumer trust. What AI is replacing is not creativity, but repetitive work and delayed decision-making. The marketer of tomorrow will still need strong brand instincts. They will simply be making those decisions with far more intelligence at their fingertips. For India's FMCG giants, that may prove to be AI's biggest contribution. Not writing advertisements. But quietly influencing every decision that happens before consumers ever see one.