Published on: May 28, 2026
India’s marketing industry is good at telling its own story. Optimistic. Forward-looking. Written, almost always, in the voice of people who have everything under control.
The India CMO Index 2026 asks a different question entirely.
The CMO Assembly surveyed 121 senior marketing leaders across India — anonymously, with no names attached and no right answers. What came back is one of the more candid pictures of Indian marketing leadership produced to date. Not because the problems are new. But because of how precisely and how honestly, the people living them chose to name them.
Before the findings, consider this: 85% of India’s senior marketing leaders say their influence has grown over the last three years. The CMO seat, by every measure, is ascending.
Now consider what sits alongside that number.
Only 21% feel very high confidence in their current marketing setup. Only 7% say their measurement is actually sorted. And only 12% have AI genuinely embedded in how work gets done.
This is not a story about CMOs who are struggling. It is a story about a function that has outgrown the infrastructure built to support it. The influence is real. The systems have not kept up.
Ask a CMO how they invest, and 53% will tell you they run balanced brand and performance budgets. Ask what they would do if budgets were cut by 30% tomorrow, and 44% would defend performance first.
That gap between stated philosophy and actual behaviour under pressure is one of the most telling findings in the report. It is not a criticism. It is a structural reality that most CMOs privately acknowledge, and few organisations are designed to solve.
Naveen Murali, VP Marketing at SUGAR Cosmetics, framed it as an operating challenge rather than a philosophical debate. The teams leading the next phase, he noted, are the ones building systems that connect long-term brand equity with short-term business accountability.
Sukita Tapadia, CMO at The Pant Project, offered a north star for D2C brands specifically: rising month-over-month brand search volume signals a brand is transitioning from renting demand to owning it. The strategic error, she said, is treating brand building as something to do later.
Only 1 in 8 Indian CMOs has AI genuinely embedded in how work gets done. For the remaining 88%, adoption is present but shallow — used by a few power users, still largely experimental, or in some cases cosmetic.
The more interesting signal is not where AI is today but where it is moving. The report identifies a fast-rising shift from text-first to video-first AI happening at practitioner level, across sectors, before it has registered in marketing strategy.
Kartik Subramanian, Head of Brand at Raymond Lifestyle Limited, captured the shift in thinking: the conversation has moved from you vs AI to what you and AI bring to the table together. Abhijit Panicker, Head of Marketing at Chai Point, put the framework plainly: humans drive strategy and creative thinking while AI drives speed, precision and consistency.
The question the report leaves open is whether organisations are moving fast enough to make that framework real.
The Measurement Problem Nobody Has Solved
93% of respondents have meaningful measurement gaps. Brand impact is the biggest blind spot, cited by 63% of CMOs. Attribution, influencer ROI and incrementality follow closely behind.
What makes this finding particularly significant is not the scale of the gap but its persistence. This is not a new problem. The same gaps have been named by generation after generation of marketing leaders.
Sankalp Rohatgi, Sr. Director and Head of Growth at Groww, identified three pressures converging at once: the demand for immediate outcomes, the acceleration of AI adoption and growing uncertainty around what can truly be measured.
Tamal Chatterjee, Chief Growth Officer at Sid’s Farm, pointed to a specific blind spot: the industry continues to over-credit the last click while underestimating organic discovery, influencer impact and repeat behaviour.
The tools have improved. The problem has not moved. For an industry built on the promise of better measurement, that persistence is worth sitting with.
What They Would Actually Stop
The report’s most human section is its most revealing. 70% of CMOs named short-termism and ROI pressure as their single biggest challenge. The quarterly clock, the report concludes, is a more immediate strategic threat to Indian marketing leadership than AI.
“Stop justifying brand spend. Full stop,” said one CMO from FMCG, anonymously.
“Stop living quarter to quarter like it’s survival,” said another from BFSI.
“Stop treating AI as a content shortcut and start using it seriously,” said a third from Pharma.
These are not the words of people who do not know what good looks like. They are the words of people who know exactly what good looks like and are describing, with unusual candour, what stops them from getting there.
Why This Report Matters
The India CMO Index 2026 is Edition 01 of what The CMO Assembly intends as an annual benchmark. Edition 02 fields in Q1 2027 and will track whether AI embedment moves beyond 12%, whether brand investment survives performance pressure and whether CMO confidence begins to close the gap with CMO influence.
For the adtech and martech industry, the implications are direct. 54% of CMOs believe AI will reduce their agency dependency within 24 months. 93% have measurement gaps that remain unsolved. The opportunity is significant and so is the responsibility.
What the India CMO Index 2026 ultimately captures is not a function in crisis. It is a function that has moved faster than the systems designed to support it. The CMOs surveyed here are not short of ambition or self-awareness. They named what is broken, anonymously, with unusual clarity.
The report does not offer solutions. It does something rarer — it tells the truth. And in an industry that produces a great deal of optimistic content about itself, that is worth something.
Read the full press release here. Download the India CMO Index 2026 here.
Adtech Today’s full interview series with contributors and partners from the index publishes through June.
The India CMO Index 2026 is an initiative by The CMO Assembly. Adtech Today is the official media partner. Support partners: Inshorts, Public and Nvecta.
