Adland, AI And The Shift

As AI rewrites the rules of creativity, agency models evolve and client expectations intensify, the advertising industry is grappling with a central question: what exactly needs resetting, and how fast?

- By Reema Bhaduri

There is one word quietly dominating conversations across Indian advertising this year — reset. Not disruption or transformation, but reset.

It matters because this is not about erasing the past, but rethinking the future with clarity. As AI reshapes workflows, client relationships and creative processes, India’s adland is being forced to reassess how it operates.

Everything, All At Once

Ask Amitesh Rao, CEO South Asia at Leo, what needs resetting first, and he offers an answer that is both sweeping and precise. “All of these and more. The pace of transformation in our lives in general, and certainly in this business, is so rapid and so dramatic. In our day-to-day lives, we don’t really recognise the extent of change. Change like that requires a reset at every level. Fundamentally, the definition of creativity, the power that creativity has — we are believers in that power. That is why we are in this business, that’s why we love it. It is the power to change something. It is the power to do something that is better for a human being, for a community, for a business and for the planet,” he says.

Rao is not suggesting that one part of the industry is broken. He believes advertising is undergoing a systemic shift, which means the reset must also be systemic. From the way briefs are written to how campaigns are distributed, every stage of the process is being reshaped.

What has not changed, he insists, is the intrinsic value of the creative impulse itself. “The intrinsic nature of why creative people love doing what they do and what they can make with that power has not changed. But the way it’s done has changed. And that’s where the reset is required,” Rao adds. Process, talent mindset, structural architecture of the agency ecosystem — all of it, he argues, is part of the same interconnected puzzle.

Building While Flying