AI will handle 95% of marketing tasks but human creative augmentation is here to stay

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently predicted that artificial intelligence will handle 95% of marketing tasks, prompting industry leaders to grapple with how human creativity can survive AI’s rapid integration into advertising. This shift represents advertising’s most dramatic transformation, with agencies and brands now racing to harness AI’s capabilities while preserving the emotional intelligence and cultural nuance that make campaigns memorable.

What industry leaders are saying: Executives emphasize that combining AI with human creativity, rather than resisting it, is essential for survival in the evolving landscape.

• “To resist AI to save your job is the surest way of losing it,” said Sam Balsara, chairman of Madison World, a major advertising agency, advocating for AI to be “utilised and combined with human ingenuity.”
• Josy Paul, chairman of BBDO, a global advertising firm, envisions the future requiring “story whisperers, emotion engineers, truth spotters, empathy coders” who can “whisper to it, joke with it, challenge it, and make it feel things.”
• “Think of AI like wearable technology, it’s about enhancing human capabilities, not replacing humans,” explained Pratik Shetty, head of marketing at Flipkart, India’s largest e-commerce platform.

The compliance breakthrough: AI is transforming regulatory challenges into creative opportunities for highly regulated industries like financial services and pharmaceuticals.

• “AI can create compliant advertising. AI works a lot on what you are prompted to do and if your prompts are all the compliance frameworks, all your regulations, everything is correctly prompted, then AI will create something that is compliant with that,” said Siddharth Shakdher, chief marketing officer of Paytm, a major digital payments company.
• This development allows companies previously handcuffed by regulatory requirements to generate creative concepts that are inherently compliant from conception.

The quality concern: Despite AI’s efficiency gains, industry leaders worry about a potential decline in creative standards as the technology democratizes content creation.

• Shakdher predicts quality will nosedive from 50% decent ads to potentially just 10-20% in premium slots, warning that “you’ll start to see transactional communication if people jump on it too quickly.”
• The risk is that premium advertising slots, including costly IPL (Indian Premier League) commercial breaks, could become “dumping grounds for algorithmically optimized but emotionally hollow communications.”

What’s changing operationally: Companies are reclaiming creative control and reducing dependence on external agencies through AI-augmented internal teams.

• Madhur Acharya, vice president at Aqualens, a contact lens company, reports that “the volume of creatives we now produce internally (via AI + team) has reduced dependence on external agencies.”
• One startup produced 60-70 films in six months for its brands, “an unthinkable exercise in the past.”
• Smaller teams are now producing more work with faster iteration cycles, replacing traditional campaign models with continuous experimentation.

The human element remains critical: While AI handles tactical execution, the emotional precision and cultural understanding that make ads memorable still require human intuition.

• Shetty shared that Flipkart “once spent 43 days getting a single actor’s expression right,” emphasizing that “the concept, screenplay and subtle nuances that make an ad memorable still require human creativity.”
• Prativa Mohapatra, vice president and managing director of Adobe India, sees AI unlocking “more 3D” and “more imaginative stuff,” with technical limitations that once constrained creative ambition now evaporating.

The bigger picture: Rather than replacing human creativity, AI is positioning to liberate creative professionals to focus on higher-level strategic thinking and emotional storytelling.

• Paul argues that “AI can compute, collate, and clone, but it can’t dream. That’s where the soul lives. That’s where truth meets magic.”
• The Indian advertising ecosystem is particularly well-positioned for this transition, with its combination of technical talent, cultural diversity, and creative heritage enabling agencies to leverage AI for amplifying cultural storytelling rather than homogenizing it.