Global companies use AI in India to bring marketing in-house

Global brands are shifting creative authority from outside agencies to India-based corporate hubs, where artificial intelligence is turning marketing work into a faster, cheaper in-house function. At Kimberly-Clark, an India-built AI platform has cut content creation from 24 days to two hours, a change that shows how quickly creative work is moving out of agency hands and into multinational service centers.

Deena Dayalan, who leads Kimberly-Clark’s India operation, said the system now helps identify suitable influencers and localize campaigns across markets. Other company hubs, including those at Catalyst Brands and Target India, are using AI across marketing functions such as generating product images and videos, choosing influencers and optimizing campaigns. The result is not just faster production, but a broader transfer of decision-making power to corporate centers in India that once handled back-office tasks.

That shift carries clear winners and losers. Global companies gain speed and lower dependence on external agencies, especially when product launches and marketing calendars move quickly. Agencies, by contrast, face pressure on routine production work as AI makes it easier to spin up multiple ad versions and test them at scale. The firms most likely to benefit are those that can pair human judgment with machine-generated assets, while Indian white-collar workers who can handle strategy, domain knowledge and product thinking become more valuable than pure execution talent.

The change is also reshaping hiring inside India’s offshore centers. Dayalan said coding alone will not be enough, and companies are placing less emphasis on entry-level recruitment while leaning more heavily on experienced workers. Kimberly-Clark is rolling out company-wide AI training as it expands the role of its India hub beyond support functions. India’s annual output of about 1.5 million engineering graduates gives employers a deep talent pool, but it also increases pressure on universities and companies to train workers for a mix of technical, product and marketing skills rather than coding alone.

Bengaluru has become one of the key testing grounds for that transition. Global capability centres in India are moving from processing and support toward engineering, data, product and now creative work, making the country a central node in the global AI economy. The biggest change is not simply that ads are produced faster. It is that ideas, control and campaign ownership are increasingly being pulled inside multinational hubs in India, where brands can redesign how marketing gets made.