Bata India has moved its creative production from a fully agency-dependent model to an AI-run system, with autonomous AI agents handling the end-to-end creative workflow. The company says the shift, implemented with AI marketing technology company Zocket, is saving it more than US$1 million annually in agency and production costs.
The new system covers the creative process from briefing, content creation and review to publishing, response management and post-performance learning. The move allows Bata India's marketing team to manage creative execution in-house through an AI stack developed with Zocket, while continuing to retain human oversight for brand direction, consumer strategy, campaign thinking and final decision-making.
Bata India has also been running its online reputation management entirely through AI agents for the past three months. Monitoring and responses across key social platforms are being handled without agency or outsourced support.
Under the new workflow, briefs are generated using live brand and category intelligence, following which assets are created and adapted across formats, reviewed, scheduled and published. Performance data from each post is then fed into subsequent briefs, creating a continuous feedback loop between content creation and performance learning.
The system is supported by a live intelligence layer that tracks footwear trends, consumer signals, brand conversations, campaign context and market movements. This allows Bata India to generate and adapt images and videos for digital campaigns, product stories and seasonal occasions, while maintaining a consistent brand voice across consumer queries, comments and direct messages.
The company says the transition has also increased output per marketer and shortened campaign turnaround times. Instead of briefing and supervising external agencies for creative execution, the in-house team now directs the AI system, with human marketers continuing to focus on strategy, brand building and judgement.
Badri Beriwal, Chief Strategy Officer and Chief Business Development Officer, Bata India, said, “At Bata, we are continuously strengthening the way we engage with today’s consumer. Digital conversations are no longer limited to campaign windows. They are always-on, fast-moving and increasingly visual. We have moved from being entirely dependent on agencies for creative execution to running our full creative calendar on AI — briefing, creation, review, publishing and the learning loop that follows. It has made us significantly faster and more productive, and it is saving us over a million dollars a year in agency and production costs that we can now reinvest in building the brand.”
Karthik Venkateswaran, Co-founder and CEO, Zocket, said, “Zocket is proud to support Bata India on one of the most complete AI transformations we have seen in consumer marketing. Bata has moved from debating AI to deploying it, putting autonomous AI agents to work across brand moderation and creative production, powered by a living knowledge graph of the brand and its consumers. Bata’s team has set the benchmark for what category leadership looks like in the AI era, and we are committed to supporting them as they take it further.”
The development comes as brands increasingly look at AI beyond individual content-generation tasks and towards automating parts of the wider marketing workflow. In Bata India's case, the technology is being used across consumer intelligence, creative production, publishing, moderation and performance learning, with the company positioning the model as a way to improve speed and productivity while reducing dependence on external execution partners.
