At Visionaries 2026, India’s top marketers confront the Age of AI

Storyboard18’s flagship Visionaries program has functioned less like an industry event and more like a council: an invitation-only gathering of the country’s most influential chief marketing officers, brand custodians and growth leaders. Past editions have drawn senior marketers from legacy conglomerates and new-age insurgents alike, building a reputation as the most prestigious congregation of CMOs in India — one where candour is valued over keynotes, and peer learning trumps performative thought leadership.

The first edition of Visionaries 2026 will be held in New Delhi on February 6, bringing together a carefully curated group of India’s most influential marketing leaders at a time of profound change.

The 2026 edition arrives at a moment of unusual inflection. Artificial intelligence, once the subject of speculative panels and cautious pilots, has moved decisively into the core of marketing operations. The theme — Marketing in the Age of AI — is less a provocation than an acknowledgement of reality: that the discipline is being structurally rewritten.

What set Visionaries 2026 apart is the calibre of executives grappling with its consequences.

The Delhi chapter brings together a cross-section of India’s most consequential marketing leaders across industries and brands. These include Air India, InfoEdge, Schneider Electric, PepsiCo, KFC India, DLF, Visa, Akasa Air, Axis Max Life, Nykaa, Zepto, Nestlé, Lenovo, Google, Hyatt, Haleon, Perfetti Van Melle, Jaquar, Google and more.

If earlier Visionaries editions focused on growth, creativity and consumer insight, the 2026 conversations will carry a sharper edge. AI is no longer discussed as a tool for efficiency alone. It is examined as a force reshaping decision-making, creativity and accountability itself.

For marketers, this has meant confronting uncomfortable questions. When algorithms can predict intent, personalise at scale and generate content in seconds, where does human judgement still matter? How do brands retain a distinctive voice when machine-generated sameness is only a prompt away? And perhaps most critically, who owns the consequences when automated systems make decisions that affect trust, bias and reputation?

Leaders will speake of a shift from “campaign thinking” to “system thinking” — where marketing is no longer a sequence of launches but a continuously learning engine, fed by data, culture and context. On the table will be dialogues on the temptation of over-automation, measurement, and intent.

There is also a sober recognition that AI is collapsing traditional silos. Marketing, commerce, customer service and product design are converging, forcing CMOs to become orchestral conductors rather than departmental specialists. In this environment, leadership is less about controlling narratives and more about setting guardrails—ethical, creative and strategic—within which intelligent systems operate.

That these debates are unfolding within the Visionaries forum is no accident. Since its inception, the program has positioned itself as a space where India’s top marketers can speak about what is actually working, what is failing, and what keeps them awake at night. Storyboard18, as a platform, has steadily documented the evolution of Indian marketing — from television-led mass reach to digital-first performance, and now to an era defined by considered abundance, where data, content and commerce blur into one.

The 2026 edition suggests that the next phase will be less about mastering tools and more about mastering judgement.

In an age where machines can optimise endlessly, Visionaries makes a case for something more elusive: discernment. The ability to know when not to personalise. When not to automate. When to let a brand be inefficient, human and imperfect — because that, too, is what consumers increasingly recognise as real.

As the Visionaries program travels to other editions this year, one thing is clear. India’s most powerful marketers are no longer asking whether AI will transform their function. They are asking how to lead responsibly when it already has — and what it will take to ensure that, in a world of intelligent systems, brands remain unmistakably human.

More on the Visionaries chapters here.