As we begin the New Year, we spoke to industry leaders to reflect on the shifts that shaped 2025 and the forces expected to define 2026. For Anand Jain, Co-Founder and Chief Marketing Officer, CleverTap, 2025 marked the moment AI began moving from a passive tool to an active collaborator in marketing workflows.
Reflecting on the most defining trend of 2025, Jain explains how agentic AI systems quietly entered the marketing mainstream, setting the foundation for far deeper transformation ahead. “2025 marked the early rise of agentic AI - systems that could observe, reason, and take simple actions across workflows. Still at an early stage of maturity, these agents began supporting teams by interpreting signals and handling routine steps, with marketing seeing early use cases in reading behaviour and suggesting next actions. It was the year AI started evolving from a tool into a collaborative digital teammate.”
Building on this shift, Jain believes 2026 will be the year when scale, creativity, and intelligence are fundamentally redefined by autonomous systems working behind the scenes. “The rise of AI agents will create a new class of digital employees - autonomous systems capable of handling tasks that once required specialised teams: analysis, experimentation, optimisation, asset creation, channel orchestration. These agents don’t just automate; they operate, making decisions, running loops, and improving themselves over time. As these digital employees multiply and tap into virtually unlimited compute, businesses unlock something that was never operationally or economically feasible before: true hyper-personalisation at the individual level. Every user can have their own strategy, their own journey, their own cadence, their own predicted outcome - all continuously shaped by agents working behind the scenes. This is the defining shift. Not personalisation as we know it, but millions of micro-strategies running in parallel, each optimised for a single human being.”
He adds that creative output and analytical advantage will undergo equally profound change as AI matures from support system to strategic engine. “Creative production will transform as well. As models learn the softer edges of brand - tonality, emotion, visual grammar, cultural nuance - AI will produce most marketing assets with near-human fidelity. Trust in AI to handle brand-safe, brand-true communication will keep increasing. Humans will shift from creators to creative directors of AI, shaping intent rather than executing output. The long-standing advantage that large companies held - access to expensive talent, sophisticated analytics stacks, and teams capable of building complex heuristics - will begin to erode. AI will increasingly infer patterns, generate insights, and convert them into actions automatically, without requiring specialised analysts or data scientists to stitch everything together. Smaller businesses, which traditionally lacked the expertise and tooling to run advanced analysis, will suddenly operate with a similar intelligence layer as the largest enterprises. Smart talent now simply moves up the value chain toward problem-finding, creative leaps, and higher-order strategy. But the act of producing insights, identifying patterns, or recommending actions becomes a commodity layer - no longer a privilege of scale, but a capability available to all.”
(As told to Ruchika Jha)
