For nearly three decades, the internet's advertising economy has rested on one simple mechanical act: the click. A user typed a query, a page of ten blue links appeared, and somewhere in that ranked list—or in the paid slots above it—a brand fought to be chosen. It is precisely that moment Gemini is now dissolving.
Google is reportedly in early conversations with advertisers about introducing ads directly into Gemini, its conversational AI assistant. The formats being tested go well beyond a banner bolted onto a chat window. Conversational Discovery lets a user ask an open-ended question and receive a synthesized, back-and-forth recommendation that surfaces sponsored products as naturally as organic ones. Highlighted answers embed brand mentions inside the AI's direct response, rather than alongside it in a separate box. In both cases, the ad is no longer something a user scrolls past—it is folded into the answer itself.
That is a fundamentally different transaction than the one Google has sold advertisers for twenty-five years. Cost-per-click pricing assumes a page exists to be clicked on. Gemini increasingly removes the page altogether, as the assistant reads the web on the user's behalf and hands back a conclusion. Industry-watchers have taken to calling this a zero-click reality—if the AI answers the question inside the chat, the brand's website or landing page may never enter the picture at all. For marketers who have spent a decade optimising funnels that end in a click, that is not an incremental shift. It is the ground moving.
Two changes follow. The first is measurement: if the AI response is the moment of conversion, how does a brand prove it actually helped? The second is data: a model can only recommend what it can accurately verify, which means product feeds, pricing and first-party data—the plumbing of e-commerce—now sit at the centre of the advertising conversation. IMPACT put forth both questions to marketers, agency heads and founders to find out how India's advertising industry is positioning for first-mover advantage.
From Clicks to Conversations
Jacob Joseph, VP–Data Science at CleverTap, frames the shift as the end of viewing the results page as a competitive arena. “For years, digital marketing has revolved around the search results page. Brands fought for rankings, clicks and visibility. Conversational AI changes that equation because there is no page to compete on,” he says. He believes India's fluid, code-switching conversational culture is unusually well-suited to this transition, and that the emerging discipline of Answer Engine Optimisation and Generative Engine Optimisation boils down to one thing: “AI has to understand your business before it can recommend it with confidence.”
Madan Kamath, Vice President & Head of Marketing at HomeLane, pushes back on the industry's reflexive answer of simply adopting journey-based attribution. “Traditional advertising, at its core, has always been an interruption. Conversational AI flips that. If done right, an ad or a brand mention shows up inside a conversation the person is already having, at the exact moment they're asking a real question,” he says. The harder problem, he argues, is proving that the trust built in a good human conversation—the kind that happens in HomeLane's experience centres—can be replicated when “the person on one side of the conversation is an LLM instead of a designer.” That validation layer, he says bluntly, does not exist yet for most categories.
Bala Kumaran, Founder & CEO of BrandStory Digital, sees the same reordering of priorities. “ROI can no longer be measured only through cost per click or immediate conversions,” he says, arguing that engagement quality, assisted conversions and customer lifetime value will carry far more weight than they currently do. “The brands that start experimenting early will be the ones setting new performance benchmarks—where trust, relevance, and meaningful engagement become as valuable as visibility.”
The Trust Problem, and the Category Test
Nikhil Khatri, Vice President–Biddable Performance at LS Digital, stresses on the inevitability of what's happening. “Every platform eventually looks at monetisation, and AI was never going to be an exception. The real question is how brands use it without making the experience feel intrusive,” he says. He points out that the questions people ask an AI are qualitatively different from what they type into a search bar—advice, comparisons and reassurance, rather than keywords—which means brands chasing rankings will need an entirely different playbook to earn a place in that answer.
Janavi Achtani, Founder of Bounty Box Inc, agrees the timing is more predictable than disruptive, but sees real opportunity for brands willing to move first. “If Gemini gets advertising right, it could become a high-intent touchpoint for brands,” she says. “Marketers in India who start experimenting early and focus on being genuinely relevant, rather than just pushing ads, will have an advantage.”
For categories where the purchase itself is emotional, the picture is more nuanced. Kabir Kate, Chief Marketing Officer at Solitario, which sells luxury lab-grown diamonds, doubts conversational commerce will ever fully replace the physical or curated digital moment of purchase in this category. “High-ticket luxury is deeply emotional and experiential; consumers are unlikely to use direct checkout within a chat window for such significant purchases,” he says. Instead, he expects Gemini to function as the ultimate high-intent, top-of-funnel discovery tool, which is useful for simplifying complex education—like comparing the 4Cs of a diamond in a chat—but valuable precisely because it hands the customer off to a boutique or e-commerce ecosystem rather than trying to close the sale itself.
Rebuilding the Plumbing
If there is one point of near-total agreement, it is this: none of it works without clean data. Kamath is direct about what that means at HomeLane. “Product specifications, materials, finishes, and pricing logic—all of it needs to be clean and structured enough for an AI to query accurately. A wrong answer about a laminate or a warranty term doesn't just fail to convert, it actively damages the trust we're trying to build,” he says, describing the process as ‘as much unlearning as relearning.’
Kumaran frames it in broader terms: “Data is no longer just a backend function, it is a core part of the customer experience, every inaccurate response has the potential to weaken trust.”
Joseph puts it more bluntly. “AI recommendations are only as good as the signals they receive. Brands with fragmented data and inconsistent messaging will find it much harder to become part of those conversations," he states.
That data question folds into a bigger one about transparency. As Joseph puts it, “When advertising sits inside a conversation instead of alongside it, the line between a recommendation and a promotion becomes much finer. Transparency around sponsored responses won't just be a regulatory requirement; it'll be fundamental to preserving confidence in the platform itself.”
What Happens to the Agency
The disruption isn't confined to brands. If Gemini can generate and optimise a campaign directly from a business brief, what remains of the traditional media-buying agency? Kamath expects agencies to adapt faster than the enterprises that depend on them, not slower. “Agencies are structurally built to move quickly. They see patterns across many clients at once, and reinvention is closer to its core competency than it is for an enterprise marketing team managing a single, complex business,” he says, pointing to how enterprises often underplay change's impact until too late—as they did, in his view, with influencer marketing and D2C.
Kumaran frames it as a shift in the agency's job description rather than a threat to its existence: “Technology can generate campaigns, but it cannot fully understand human emotions, cultural nuances or evolving consumer expectations.” The clients of the future, he argues, will pay for judgement and strategic direction, not execution.
The Real First-Mover Advantage
What emerges from these conversations is a rare consensus across categories as different as modular furniture, luxury diamonds and biddable media: the brands that win the Gemini ad era will not be the ones who buy the most inventory first; they will be the ones whose data AI can trust enough to recommend confidently, and whose presence inside a conversation feels like help rather than interruption. As Joseph puts it, summing up the stakes for an entire industry recalibrating in real time, “The first-mover advantage won't belong to the brands that buy Gemini ads first. It will belong to the brands that understand how discovery itself is changing and earn enough trust to be the recommendation.”
