Why India’s CMOs can no longer outsource technology thinking

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TL;DR:

MakeMyTrip’s AI-led transformation offers CMOs a useful lesson: marketing is moving closer to product, technology and revenue. The danger is mistaking measurable intent capture for the whole job. AI can improve efficiency, but brands still need investment that creates future demand rather than merely harvesting today’s.

Article:

For years, the CMO could plausibly treat technology as somebody else’s department. That defence is becoming difficult to sustain.

MakeMyTrip offers an unusually visible example. Its leadership has described marketing as increasingly concerned with capturing consumer intent efficiently, understanding data and deploying technologies such as large language models and agentic systems. CMO and business leader Raj Rishi Singh has also argued that marketers must contribute directly to the business rather than remain confined to conventional measures of brand activity.

The company itself is moving well beyond AI as a communications tool. In its June-quarter disclosures, MakeMyTrip said its conversational assistant Myra 2.0 could support end-to-end booking across eight Indian languages. Management said the assistant handled more than eight million conversations during the quarter, while AI was generating more than 75% of company code and automated support was independently resolving more than half of customer calls.

That matters to marketers because the boundary between communication and experience is disappearing. When search, recommendation, servicing, personalisation and transaction happen through the same intelligent interface, the brand promise is no longer delivered mainly through advertising. It is delivered by software.

The implications extend well beyond travel. A marketer overseeing personalised recommendations without understanding the underlying data architecture is effectively delegating part of the brand. The same is true of automated creative, dynamic offers, conversational agents and customer-service systems.

This helps explain why MakeMyTrip has previously discussed substantial marketing investment in martech and closer collaboration between marketing, product and data teams. Singh has described marketing as simultaneously creative and analytical, with technology becoming integral to how customer engagement is designed.

For Indian CMOs, that changes the talent equation. The scarce capability may no longer be somebody who can simply commission good campaigns. It is leadership capable of connecting consumer insight, creative judgment, unit economics, product design, data governance and automation.

The winners are likely to be marketers who can translate between those disciplines. Technology vendors benefit too, as more marketing budgets migrate towards infrastructure rather than media alone.

There is, however, a dangerous interpretation of the “contribute directly to business” argument. Marketing activity closest to a transaction is usually easiest to measure. That does not make it the only activity creating economic value. If every campaign is forced to justify itself through immediate conversion, companies can progressively underinvest in memory, distinctiveness, reputation and future demand. The dashboards improve before the brand weakens.

AI intensifies that temptation because it can optimise enormous numbers of interactions quickly. Personalisation, automated creative and real-time bidding can make demand capture increasingly precise. They cannot guarantee that consumers will care about the brand when competitors acquire comparable technology.

The strategic task is therefore not to choose between brand and performance. It is to determine where machines improve execution and where human judgment protects differentiation.

Singh himself has made a similar distinction in discussing automation, arguing that automation should support intelligence rather than become its substitute. MakeMyTrip’s own trajectory provides the more useful lesson.

The company is applying AI across discovery, booking, customer service, engineering and operational processes, while continuing to invest in customer acquisition and new products. Its latest quarter also showed gross bookings of roughly $2.9 billion, up 19.9% year on year in constant currency, giving the transformation a commercial rather than purely experimental context.

A CMO who understands only communications will struggle in such an environment. So will one who understands only attribution.

The new mandate requires answering harder questions. Which customer friction deserves automation? Which data should influence personalisation? Where does efficiency improve experience, and where does it merely cut cost? What must remain recognisably human? How much current demand should be harvested, and how much future demand must still be created?

Those decisions increasingly determine both the customer experience and the economics of growth.

For boards and CEOs, the actionable conclusion is not to turn every CMO into a chief technology officer. It is to stop treating technological and commercial fluency as optional extras in senior marketing leadership.

For CMOs, the test is sharper: learn enough about the machinery to decide what it should optimise. Otherwise, the machinery will quietly decide what marketing becomes.