As AI reshapes the Internet, search is evolving beyond keywords into something far more conversational, contextual and personalised. Speaking to IMPACT Magazine, Satya Raghavan, Director, Marketing Partners, Google India, said consumers today expect platforms like Google Search to respond less like search engines and more like intelligent assistants.
“The consumer is still queen or king,” he said, pointing to the widening generational divide within households, from Gen Alpha to Boomers, all consuming information differently. “The old paradigm was when people just searched using a single word, but today people are actually having conversations with search.”
Watch the full interview here:
Powered by Gemini, Google’s large language model, AI Overviews and AI Mode are enabling users to ask more layered and nuanced questions. Instead of typing prompts such as 'Vitamin D', users are increasingly searching through full conversational queries, asking what supplements they should take if they live somewhere with limited sunlight throughout the year.
According to Raghavan, AI is also ushering in what he describes as 'personal intelligence', where answers adapt to a user’s context, preferences and age, provided they opt into the experience. "That’s what the power of AI is doing to search today,” he said.
Beyond search, Raghavan highlighted YouTube’s expanding role in commerce and product discovery, particularly among Gen Z audiences. Following partnerships with platforms including Flipkart, Myntra, Nykaa, Tira Beauty and Purplle, YouTube’s affiliate ecosystem in India has scaled rapidly, allowing creators to turn content into direct commerce opportunities.
“What we’re seeing creators do is when they normally talk about a product, we now see them tagging that product onto their videos,” he explained. “Consumers are influenced by this because creators stand for authenticity.”
Raghavan believes this shift is steadily transforming YouTube into a 'video commerce' platform, especially across beauty and lifestyle categories, where creator recommendations increasingly carry greater influence than traditional celebrity endorsements.
Discussing the future of advertising in India’s fragmented digital ecosystem, Raghavan made a strong case for hyper-personalised AI-driven campaigns over broad mass storytelling.
“I’m a big fan of hyper-personalised AI content,” he said, adding that marketers are moving beyond basic geo-targeting to create campaigns tailored by language, dialect and demographic nuances.
Using Gemini, brands can now customise campaigns with local dialects that shift 'every 50 kilometres', reflecting India’s linguistic diversity with greater authenticity. “The future is hyper-hyper-personalised,” he said, adding that AI could fundamentally reshape how advertising is consumed across regions and audience segments.
Raghavan also believes marketing has entered what he calls the 'agentic era', where AI agents can autonomously analyse large volumes of data and deliver insights at unprecedented speed.
“An agent can actually be the superpower for a CMO,” he said. “Earlier, marketers would take days to derive insights from data. Now agents can crunch huge amounts of first-party and second-party data at the speed of light.”
While he acknowledged that AI agents still require insight and clearly defined parameters, he emphasised how accessible the technology has become. “It doesn’t take much to build an agent,” he noted, revealing that he built his first AI agent himself after spending a week to understand the fundamentals.
For Raghavan, the larger shift is unmistakable: AI is no longer simply optimising marketing workflows; it is fundamentally redefining how consumers discover, interact with and purchase products online.
