How AI Is Rewiring The Consumer Growth Stack Across India’s B2C Economy

John Wanamaker, one of the biggest retailers of the 1900s, once said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is, I don’t know which half.” And marketers held this as an absolute for a hundred years. 

But the truth is, it wasn’t just a marketing problem. 

The operations head didn’t know what was slowing deliveries down. The product team didn’t know which feature users actually wanted. The finance team was forecasting expenses without comprehending the data. And more often than not, gut feelings ran businesses. 

In 2026, AI is closer to fixing that than anyone ever was. By making sense of granular data, AI is now helping companies find customers faster, enable quicker deliveries, and make business decisions in minutes instead of weeks.

From ecommerce and logistics to healthcare and direct-to-consumer brands, AI is no longer just a single team’s tool. It now runs through the entire business. 

And this shift sat at the centre of a roundtable hosted by Inc42 and Mobavenue AI, themed “How Consumer Brands Are Rebuilding Growth For An AI-First Era”. Leaders across consumer tech, ecommerce, logistics, healthcare, and retail got together to discuss what is actually changing on the ground.

The conversation was less about tools and more about reckoning. Why the old formula of building a funnel, running it and hoping it works is no longer enough, and what brands are putting in its place. 

The session was moderated by Karan Saraf, Managing Director at PwC India.

Some of the key participants included:

• Jayant Basantani, VP of India business at Mobavenue AI
• Prerna Kalra, the cofounder and CEO of Daalchini
• Nilabh Banerji, the head of marketing at Biryani Blues
• Sana Grover, AVP (brand marketing and content) at Naukri
• Shubham Bhandari, head of business at VAMA 
• Vivek Bhaskar, head of marketing and growth at MilkBasket 
• Anirudh Ahluwalia, associate director, performance marketing, HexaHealth 
• Aditya Verma, cofounder and chief growth officer, Astroyogi 
• Piyush Singh, senior director of growth and marketing at Shiprocket 
• Shantanu Chauhan, director of marketing, Noise 
• Alok Paul, COO, Littlebox

AI Is Becoming Unavoidable For Consumer Businesses

AI is no longer confined to marketing experiments. It has become the underlying operating layer of consumer-facing businesses.

A case in point is the spiritual tech platform VAMA, where AI now spans the entire value chain, from ideation to execution. 

According to VAMA’s head of business, Bhandari, the company’s creative and operational bandwidth is increasingly being augmented by machine intelligence. “AI is being used across the company. Almost every department uses it in some way, but for us, it has been especially helpful in content creation. We run roughly 200 unique ads per day, and a lot of ideas come from AI.”

For Noise, however, using AI is more about organisational discipline than efficiency. “With AI, we have begun to standardise processes that were earlier fragmented across teams. Even product testing, which once required manual validation, has evolved and is now being handled through automated systems running thousands of iterations,” said the director of marketing at Noise.  

Speaking about how Shiprocket has embedded AI into logistics, the senior director of growth and marketing said the logistics giant is trying to solve India-specific ecommerce challenges, such as returns.  

“We have created an RTO score, combining address quality with a user’s propensity to cancel or reject orders. This intelligence now extends into courier optimisation and real-time decisioning, where AI dynamically routes shipments based on pin-code-level performance and operational conditions,” said Singh of Shiprocket.    

He added that AI is no longer just a tool but a system that defines how businesses are designed and operated.

Customer Acquisition Moves From Channels To Predictive Signals

Apart from transforming how companies operate internally, AI is also reshaping how they acquire customers through intent, behaviour and predictive signals.

At MilkBasket, acquisition is no longer treated as a purely marketing function but as a behavioural system. “Using our customer data, AI helps us understand which category is going to bring more customers, and based on this, we have offers like free milk for seven days,” said Bhaskar. But the real lever is not the offer but habit formation. 

Bhaskar further shared that Milkbasked is using AI to figure out how to convert acquisition into routine consumption.

Speaking about how Mobavenue AI approaches outcome-led marketing, the vice president of Mobavenue AI’s India business, Basantani, said they use AI to decide what ads to show and at what time to maximise conversions.

But customer acquisition has moved beyond digital platforms into a real-world context and behaviour. At Daalchini, acquisition is deeply tied to prediction and location intelligence. 

Even legacy categories such as food and beverages are undergoing a similar transformation. At Biryani Blues, expansion decisions are no longer driven by instinct alone. “Today, we are using data such as delivery heat maps, population density, income levels and demographic profiling to identify better locations,” said Banerji. Store placement, demand forecasting and even external triggers like festivals and weather are now part of customer acquisition planning.

The New Infrastructure Of Trust

Beyond acquisition, the most profound impact of AI is being seen in how businesses make decisions, build trust and drive conversions.

At Naukri, AI has moved hiring intelligence beyond keyword matching into career trajectory prediction.

“We are looking at data in terms of people’s career trajectories… what shifts they have made or are likely to make,” said Grover, the AVP of brand marketing and content at Naukri. 

This shift allows the platform to move from static CV matching to predicting outcomes based on behavioural and historical career patterns.

In healthcare, where trust is critical, HexaHealth is using AI not to replace human judgment but to accelerate it. “What would take 30-60 minutes to recommend the right hospital earlier now takes minutes with AI,” said Ahluwalia.  

Astroyogi is taking a hybrid approach where AI handles structure but humans retain emotional depth. “AI handles the factual layer such as birth charts, planetary positions and data interpretation. However, emotional trust and familiarity still come from human astrologers,” said Verma. 

Meanwhile, Basantani of Mobavenue AI said that the company operates at the intersection of intelligence and execution. Its ML systems optimise billions of ad requests in real time, ensuring that CAC, ROAS and LTV are continuously balanced. The underlying principle remains consistent that outcomes improve only when “targeting, signalling, bucketing and reaching the right audience at the right time come together”.

The Rise Of The AI-Native Growth Stack

The conversations at the roundtable show that companies are changing the way they think about growth.

Consumer businesses are moving away from funnel-led thinking towards system-led intelligence, where acquisition is driven by signals, operations are powered by automation, and conversion is guided by predictive decisioning layers.

AI is breaking down the gap between marketing, product, and data teams by unifying them into a single system. Instead of working separately, companies are now using AI to analyse user behaviour and personalise marketing in real time.

In this new paradigm, AI is not just a feature but the system itself. And the companies that succeed will be those that can convert data into decisions, decisions into experiences and experiences into sustained customer value.

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