After hype, came backlash; what lies ahead for AI in A&M?

First came AI. Then came the buzzwords. Efficiency, personalisation at scale, predictive analytics. And with them came controversies that now define the industry's relationship with this technology.

Since 2023, to use or not to use AI in advertising and marketing has become a pressing question. 

When OpenAI’s ChatGPT, launched in 2022, and DALL-E took prominence, it amazed us. You could put in a prompt, and the platforms could generate text and images instantly. A rabbit munching on carrots? You got it. Captions for your next social media post? You could get that too. It soon entered the advertising ecosystem.

In 2022, Airtel recreated Kapil Dev's 1983 World Cup moment when global marketing AI investments stood at $12.35 billion. Cadbury's SRK ad used deepfake technology for personalised messages and went on to set a benchmark. Zomato followed with Hrithik Roshan. Coca-Cola's 2023 Masterpiece ad blended art history with AI visuals to acclaim. 

Soon, tech platforms embedded AI into core systems. Meta launched Advantage+. Google introduced Performance Max. By 2025, eMarketer reported 46% of advertisers planned to use AI tools for their strategies, across media, creative optimisation (40%), campaign activation (41%), and summarising media briefs (31%).

"At the current pace of development, four years in AI can feel like several decades," says Nitin Saini, VP-Marketing at Mondelez India. "In 2022, practical AI adoption was limited; today, we see uneven but accelerating adoption across industries. Technology-led sectors have moved faster, embedding AI into organisation-wide use cases such as customer service and automation. In marketing, however, AI remains largely in an experimentation phase. Widespread, industry-level adoption will accelerate once clear, scalable models prove their effectiveness and impact on growth."

Now, by 2030, the most profound shift AI promises isn't efficiency but liberation. 

When machines handle the mechanical, humans focus on meaning

Forrester's 2025 report found that marketing teams spend 60% of their time on repetitive tasks.

"By 2030, AI will have taken us out of the era of guesswork and into the era of intent," says Abhik Santara, Founder and CEO of ^atom. "We'll move beyond reacting to signals and into anticipating needs, moods, and moments with extraordinary precision. But the real breakthrough won't be efficiency; it will be imagination at scale. AI will remove friction from the system: faster insight, faster production, faster learning loops. That gives creativity more room to breathe, not less. When machines handle the mechanical, humans are freed to focus on meaning, originality, and emotional truth."

Research found that 30% of tasks across industries could be automated by 2030, while 60% may undergo significant changes due to AI. Hemant Shringy, Managing Partner and CCO at Wondrlab Network, offers a contrarian view. "Honestly, more than AI, the bigger threat to human imagination are humans themselves," he says. "At its best, nothing can ever even come close to the lived and felt human reality, emotion, insight and imagination."

Shringy points to Indian schools encouraging AI use while focusing on lateral thinking. "Creativity in marketing has never been about asset generation alone, and that will not change," notes Saini. By 2030, human creativity will still lead in framing original brand territories and emotional narratives. Human imagination will matter most in emotional intelligence, true originality, and brand stewardship.

Yet Shringy raises a darker possibility. "I've actually been thinking the last couple of days that we could be living a very blurred reality in the near future," he says. "AI's getting so good at generating very life-like outputs. Today we know the truth, but a couple of years down the line, people will believe that all female superstars of the last three decades graced the cover of a fashion magazine together or Messi was arrested for murder."

After all, AI has been riddled with backlash as well (despite the publicity). For example, most recently, Coca-Cola's holiday campaigns have faced criticism for morphing trucks. What’s more? The backlash followed more huge brands. 

McDonald's Netherlands pulled its AI Christmas ad in December 2025 after viewers called it creepy. The visuals included scenes illustrating domestic chaos, like cats knocking over Christmas trees, people falling while ice skating and the disappointment of burnt cookies. It aimed at achieving resonance with Dutch consumers who have expressed feeling particularly overwhelmed during the holiday season. Amid this controversy, we have even seen creative agency All Trades Co. produce an AI-generated advertisement that directly mocked the McDonald's commercial. 

H&M's digital twin initiative sparked concerns about model rights, akin to the criticism Levi’s faced when it featured AI models in its ads. According to Tracksuit's November 2025 survey, sentiment toward AI-generated advertising skewed negative at 39%, with only 18% positive.

Yet the industry marches forward and grows in size. 94% of Indian B2B marketers are seeing high ROI with AI, and 89% of SMB marketers expect to see growth using AI in ads.
A 2025 Dentsu report found that over 70% of global marketing leaders plan to invest more than 20% of their budget in innovation in 2026. The logic is simple: AI delivers efficiency gains and predictive insights.

This extends beyond just creativity.

Media shifts from allocation to orchestration

If creativity is where AI amplifies imagination, media is where it threatens to replace judgment. Industry reports project that programmatic advertising will account for over 90% of digital display spending by 2028.

"AI will optimise the how and humans will own the why," says Santara. "Media will shift from being a discipline of allocation to one of orchestration. AI will plan and buy faster than any human ever could, but it cannot decide what matters." Humans will still define what success means beyond efficiency, which moments are worth interrupting, and when to sacrifice short-term performance for long-term meaning.

Reports indicate that brands have seen a 30% increase in return on ad spend (ROAS) using AI-driven budget allocation on Meta ads. 

"By 2030, AI will vastly expand creative and marketing possibilities, but human imagination and responsibility will remain central," says Raahul Seshadri, Director of AI & Tech at WebEngage. "AI can recombine and optimise endlessly, yet meaning, taste and accountability stay human." 

Seshadri emphasises that integrated, silo-free data will be non-negotiable. Hyper-personalisation would depend more on long-term storytelling, as AI needs a clear, human-led strategy. Otherwise, each campaign would simply look disconnected.

Saini predicts digital marketing will evolve into an always-on growth engine by 2030. AI agents will interpret signals across platforms and trigger next-best actions. The traditional separation between CRM, performance, and commerce will blur into a real-time intelligence engine.

"The biggest evolution will be this: marketing will stop being about messages and start being about relationships," says Santara. "By 2030, digital marketing won't feel like channels stitched together; it will feel like a living organism."

The roles that will disappear, merge, and emerge

The World Economic Forum estimates AI will displace 92 million jobs globally by 2030, but create 170 million new ones.

It already has. Zomato fired nearly 600 customer support executives, soon after launching its AI-powered customer support platform, Nugget. Meta cut approximately 3,600 employees (5% of its global workforce) in February 2025,  Dell laid off 12,500 employees, Workday laid off 1,750 employees, Salesforce cut 1,000 jobs. In advertising, legacy agencies have been laying off their workforce, restructuring business operations, and merging strengths in a bid to outrun each other. 

According to the World Economic Forum's 2025 Future of Jobs Report, 40% of employers plan to downsize their workforce due to artificial intelligence.

"AI will not eliminate marketing roles, it will fundamentally reshape them," says Saini. Repetitive execution tasks will largely disappear. Brand and digital teams will converge into integrated brand experience managers. New roles will emerge, including AI Growth Specialists, Prompt and System Designers, AI Ethics and Governance Stewards, and Marketing Data and Intelligence Managers.

"Roles built purely on execution or manual optimisation will fade. Not because they weren't valuable, but because machines will simply outperform humans at those tasks," says Santara. 

He predicts mergers like media planner with data strategist, and entirely new roles: Creative Systems Designers, AI Brand Stewards, Prompt Architects, and Cultural Signal Analysts.

"The common thread? Hybrid thinking," says Santara. "The future belongs to people who can move fluidly between creativity, technology, and humanity." Adobe's 2025 report found 68% of creative professionals believe this will be the most valuable 2030 skill. Non-negotiable capabilities include creative systems rather than one-off assets, data fluency paired with narrative thinking, and AI literacy at every senior level.

However, will long-term brand narratives survive instant optimisation? 

According to Saini, long-term storytelling remains essential for building emotional equity and enduring brand identity. Brands that focus only on short-term conversions will be “outperformed by brands that invest in meaning, memory, and long-term relevance.”

Santara counters that this will only happen if we forget what relevance actually means. "Instant relevance without long-term meaning is noise. Long-term storytelling won't disappear; it will become more important as the anchor that gives short-term messages coherence. Great brands will use AI to tell chapters, not fragments."

So what disappears by 2030? Saini predicts static dashboards and periodic reports will vanish. AI will provide real-time, conversational insights. Manual media buying will fade, replaced by continuous optimisation based on live consumer behaviour.

Santara believes that what won’t exist in 2030 is the idea that creativity and effectiveness are trade-offs. “That false tension will be gone. AI will prove, repeatedly, that the most effective work is also the most emotionally intelligent, culturally resonant, and creatively ambitious. What won't exist anymore is the comfort of playing it safe."

The 2030 advertising industry will be an ecosystem where AI handles execution at unimaginable speed while humans define the why, the emotional core, the cultural relevance, and the ethical boundaries. 

However, it's not without concerns. Deepfakes and sexualisation using AI tools have been a consistent issue for the past few years. Elon Musk-backed AI chatbot Grok recently came under the scanner over non-consensual pornographic images, including depictions of women being assaulted or sexually abused. India’s IT Ministry flagged this issue, and Grok has since removed about 3,500 content pieces and deleted more than 600 accounts. 

What’s concerning is that there are no explicit laws introduced to deal with AI deepfakes, and in the next 5 years, this should ideally be one of the first few steps taken by governments to ensure safety.

While the conversation by 2030 won't be about whether AI belongs in advertising, it will be about whether the industry remembers to keep humanity and ethical boundaries at its centre.