Salesforce: 81% of Indian marketers adopt AI

While artificial intelligence has become mainstream among marketing teams in India, fragmented customer data continues to limit its full potential, according to Salesforce’s Tenth Edition State of Marketing report.

The study finds that 81% of marketers in India have adopted AI, but organisations with unified customer data are significantly better positioned to deliver personalised, two-way customer engagement than those operating with siloed systems.

The report reveals that 92% of marketers believe customers increasingly expect brands to engage in two-way conversations, where they can respond to marketing messages and receive meaningful replies. However, 71% say they struggle to respond quickly because they lack access to complete customer context, with limited visibility into service, sales and commerce data.

Although 86% of marketers trust AI to interact directly with customers and help scale engagement, poor data quality and disconnected systems remain major obstacles to deploying AI effectively. According to the study, organisations with unified customer data are 1.4 times more likely to respond to customers regularly and 1.6 times more likely to use AI agents for customer engagement than organisations with fragmented data environments.

“The biggest barrier to personalisation today isn’t AI; it’s the quality and connectedness of the data that powers it,” said Nishant Kalra, VP-Sales, Salesforce South Asia. “As AI agents become the next frontier of marketing, organisations need a trusted, unified view of the customer to deliver contextual, real-time engagement at scale.”

The report also highlights growing demand for personalised experiences. Eighty-three percent of marketers say they need more personalised content than they can currently produce, while 81% are already using AI to bridge that gap. Personalised content creation remains the most common AI application among marketers.

However, 98% of respondents report facing barriers to personalisation, with regulatory concerns, poor-quality or unstructured data, and a shortage of technical expertise emerging as the top challenges.

The research suggests that organisations already using AI agents have made greater progress in overcoming these hurdles. Seventy-six percent of marketers using AI agents are satisfied with their ability to connect customer touchpoints, compared with 55% among organisations without AI. High-performing marketing teams are also 1.7 times more likely to leverage customer data for relevant experiences and 1.7 times more likely to have unified their data sources.

The report points to a broader shift in digital marketing as AI changes how consumers discover brands online. Nearly 66% of marketers say they are struggling to keep pace with changing customer behaviour, while 47% admit they have yet to adapt their marketing strategies to widespread AI adoption.

As AI-generated search summaries and large language models increasingly influence purchase decisions, marketers are also revisiting their search strategies. According to the study, 91% say AI is reshaping their SEO approach, while 92% have begun optimising content for AI-generated responses such as ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overview. High-performing marketers are 2.2 times more likely than underperforming peers to have adopted Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) strategies.

The findings are based on a global survey of 4,450 marketing decision-makers, including 250 respondents from India, conducted between October and November 2025.