At e4m TechManch 2026, brand leaders from Colgate-Palmolive, Xiaomi, Shriram Finance, Panasonic, Kargo, Shemaroo Entertainment, and Piramal Consumer drew a clear line between what algorithms can do and what they cannot. Efficiency, speed, and scale belong to AI. Breakthrough ideas, emotional resonance, and brand memorability still belong to human intuition. The consensus emerged during a panel titled "The Algorithm vs Intuition: Finding the Right Creative Balance," moderated by Sahil Shah, CEO of Dentsu Creative Isobar.
AI closes the talent gap and speeds up routine work
Ayan Guha, Director of Marketing at Colgate-Palmolive, said the single biggest change AI brought to his organisation was talent density. "There were A-class players and B-class players, and the gap between them ran along four vectors, like creativity, visualisation, and analytics. The gap has narrowed because of tools like Gemini and Claude. A-class players now have to try harder, and B-class players have caught up. It's become a virtuous cycle."
Sandeep Sarma, Associate Director of Marketing and PR at Xiaomi, pointed to efficiency. Elizabeth Venkatraman, Executive Director and Head of Marketing at Shriram Finance, named speed. Work that once took 24 hours now returns in one. "Decks look cleaner, and it's not costing us the hours it used to," she said. Sunil Narula of Panasonic Life Solutions India confirmed the same shift - ideas that once needed considerable development time can now be sketched and refined far faster.
Abhishek Kumar Srivastava, VP Marketing at Piramal Consumer, described an internal framework that sorts work by how repeatable it is and how sensitive the underlying data is. "Anything highly repeatable and low-to-mid sensitivity is where AI is creeping in on a daily basis - performance creatives, analytics, even presentations. Three of my presentations this morning were AI-assisted." Where data sensitivity is high, human intervention still dominates, though he expects that to shift within a year. As AI reshapes daily marketing operations, many professionals are turning to structured AI for Marketing Courses to build the skills needed for this new workflow.
Where algorithms stop and instinct takes over
Sarma articulated a tension that surfaced repeatedly. "Any data AI relies on is, by definition, old. You can't use it to define a campaign that's launching months or a year from now." Inside Xiaomi, go-to-market teams point to data while others argue for instinct. Instinct, he said, "more often than not" wins the debate.
Guha backed the point with a concrete example. Colgate's "Kya aapke toothpaste mein namak hai" campaign launched two decades ago against what all the data said. "All the data pointed the other way. It was pure instinct. Twenty years later, it's a ₹60-crore-plus brand and market leader in the south."
Venkatraman described how Shriram Finance built its recent Shri Aarambh campaign for commercial vehicle loans. Instead of shooting the full campaign and treating it as finished, the team generated it in stages and tested each one with actual truck drivers at Transport Nagar across six or seven rounds. "The animation itself came from pure intuition and creativity, AI came in after that. In a way, we co-created it with our consumers."
Anuja Trivedi, Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer at Shemaroo Entertainment, was blunt about AI's cultural limits. "AI is a mirror to today's culture. I don't think it creates culture. Culture is lived, it's experienced, it's human-to-human, and it's about challenges. AI stands for sameness, for pattern."
Memorability vs. efficiency - a growing tension
Nabajit Nath, Sales Director at Kargo, said marketers have not abandoned memorability but have quietly over-indexed on efficiency. "Digital is so good at efficiency that we over-index on it," he said, describing a reflexive fallback on performance metrics even for brand launches or teasers. He recalled pitching a major QSR brand on clicks and attribution data, only to be told the client already had the reach. "What he wanted was for someone watching football at midnight to look at his burger and salivate. He didn't want attribution. He wanted salivation."
Srivastava pushed the concern further. He challenged the panel to recall the last ad they saw on Instagram. "Ninety per cent of these creatives are performance creatives. They're not putting the brand at the centre of what they're trying to say. Memorability has gone down. We still remember the best ads from ten years ago, five years ago." AI, he argued, is helping produce more content but not necessarily more memorable content - a gap the industry still needs to close.
Nath rejected the idea that marketers must choose between attention and attribution. "Attribution is what happened. Attention is why it happened. You optimise for both, it's a false choice."
Narula revealed that Panasonic is building a unified data lake to sit beneath its marketing - covering roughly 175,000 electricians, 200,000 retailers, 42,000 branded outlets annually, and 45-50 million annual transactions. "In order to get the bang for the buck on every rupee we spend, all of that data needs to come together." AI will sit on top of that infrastructure, making the return on marketing spend visible in ways spreadsheets never could.
Why this matters for marketers
The panel drew a practical boundary that marketers can act on immediately. Routine, repeatable, low-sensitivity tasks - performance creatives, analytics, presentation formatting - are already shifting to AI. An AI Learning Path for Marketing Managers can help teams systematise that shift without losing creative ground. But when the objective is a breakthrough campaign, a brand movement, or an idea that makes someone look at a screen and salivate at midnight, the data is retrospective by definition. The marketers on this panel were clear: instinct still makes the call, and it more often than not wins.
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