CMOs AS GROWTH ARCHITECTS: Redefining Marketing in the AI Era

 AMY TIANG
Senior Manager Marketing
Communications Solutions,
ASEAN & India Subcontinent, HID

Evolving Marketing Strategy for the AI Era

Our marketing strategy is increasingly aligned with how customers are modernising their identity and security environments. The conversation has moved beyond individual products. Enterprises are looking at how physical access, digital identity, mobile credentials, biometrics and cloudbased management can work together, and marketing has an important role in helping customers understand that transition.

We are becoming more focused on customer journeys, industry-specific requirements and the different stages of modernisation an organisation may be going through. Data and AI can help us understand those needs better, identify relevant audiences and make engagement more timely, but technology does not replace strong customer understanding.

In India, this is particularly important because organisations are modernising at very different speeds. Some are moving from traditional cards to mobile credentials, while others are looking at more integrated physical and digital identity environments. Our role is to make those conversations relevant to the customer's business priorities and create a clearer connection between security investment and business outcomes.

Brand Positioning in Competitive Market

Differentiation in identity and security has to go beyond product features. Customers are making long-term technology decisions, so they look at security, interoperability, ease of integration, partner capability and whether the technology can support their future requirements.

For HID, an important part of our differentiation is our ability to support customers as identity becomes more connected across the physical and digital worlds. Mobile access, biometrics, identity management and authentication are increasingly part of the same conversation, and we want the market to understand how these technologies can support a broader modernisation strategy.

Local relevance is equally important. What matters to a large enterprise, a growing SME, a GCC or a critical infrastructure organisation can be very different. Our marketing therefore needs to reflect the business and operational realities of each segment rather than take a one-size-fits-all approach.

From a business perspective, we are increasingly looking beyond traditional marketing measures. What matters is whether marketing is helping create qualified demand, strengthen partner-led opportunities, improve engagement with priority customers and contribute to pipeline and long-term customer relationships. That is ultimately where marketing demonstrates its value to the business.

ANNKITA KARRVA
Associate Director –
Marcom (B2B)
BenQ India

Evolving Marketing Strategy for the AI Era

For me, AI is changing the speed of marketing, but not the reason we do it. I still start with the customer: what are they trying to solve, what is changing in their world, and where can we genuinely add value? AI helps my team research faster, test ideas, personalise communication and get to execution quicker. But I don’t want us to become obsessed with using AI everywhere.

The real opportunity is to combine technology with human understanding. My focus is on building sharper propositions, more relevant conversations and marketing that moves beyond awareness to influence consideration, engagement and ultimately business growth.

Brand Positioning in Competitive Market

My biggest priority is clarity. In technology, it is very easy to talk about products, features and specifications and assume customers will see the difference. I believe marketing has to do the harder job of answering why it matters to them.

I focus on sharp positioning, strong storytelling and creating experiences that make the brand memorable. At the same time, I want marketing to be accountable to the business. We look at the quality of engagement, contribution to pipeline and how marketing supports sales and partnerships. For me, differentiation happens when the market understands not just what you sell, but why you matter.

Technology-driven Trust, Partner Ecosystems, and Customer Experience

I look at AI and data primarily as tools to understand people better, not simply as ways to automate marketing. We use insights from campaigns and digital engagement to understand what resonates, where customers are spending their attention and how we can make our communication more relevant.

In enterprise technology, trust takes time, so consistency matters enormously. Digital channels help us stay connected with customers and partners between physical interactions, while AI allows us to be more responsive and personalised. But ultimately, trust comes from delivering on what you promise. Technology can enable that relationship, but it cannot replace it.

ARVIND SAXENA
CMO
NEC India

Evolving Marketing Strategy for the AI Era

AI is transforming marketing from a function focused on communication and campaign execution into one driven by intelligence, insights and continuous customer understanding. For a B2B technology organisation like NEC India, marketing’s role is evolving to not only communicate solutions but also anticipate market conversations, understand stakeholder needs and create meaningful engagement across the customer journey.

At NEC India, we are leveraging AI across key areas of marketing, including market intelligence, audience understanding, content development, campaign optimisation and performance analysis. AI-powered tools are helping our teams identify relevant industry trends, derive sharper insights from data, personalise communication and improve the speed and scale of content creation. These AI-enabled workflows have helped us achieve 60–70% faster turnaround times, while reducing repetitive manual effort and enabling teams to focus on higher-value activities such as strategic planning, thought leadership, brand storytelling and deeper collaboration with business teams.

However, the true value of AI in marketing goes beyond efficiency. It enables us to become more agile, insight-led and customer-focused. Our approach is to combine AI-driven capabilities with human creativity, strategic thinking and domain expertise to build communication that is not only faster, but also more relevant and impactful.

Brand Positioning in Competitive Market

In an increasingly competitive technology landscape, differentiation cannot be defined only by the solutions an organisation delivers. It is shaped by the purpose behind those solutions and the impact they create. At NEC India, our purpose of “Empowering Lives, Building Tomorrow” serves as the foundation for how we approach technology, innovation and customer engagement. For us, technology is not the end objective; it is an enabler that helps create more connected, inclusive and empowered societies.

Our focus is on building narratives that connect technology with human outcomes. As AI continues to reshape industries and business models, it is important for organisations to ensure that technology adoption remains aligned with a larger purpose. AI should enhance our ability to understand, engage and serve people better, rather than become an objective in itself. Our priority is to build a stronger purpose-led brand narrative, where marketing communicates not just what NEC does, but why it matters. This involves creating meaningful thought leadership, strengthening stakeholder engagement and demonstrating how technology can enable progress for customers, businesses and society. Ultimately, NEC’s differentiation comes from combining deep technology expertise with a purpose-driven approach, ensuring that innovation continues to remain focused on empowering lives and building a better tomorrow.

KIMI GUGLANI
DirectorMarketing & Communications,
TrendAI

Evolving Marketing Strategy for the AI Era

Traditionally, a marketer’s role started the moment a prospect entered our funnel. That funnel barely exists anymore. Gartner's 2026 sales research found that B2B buyers are increasingly using a mix of digital channels, AI and human interactions throughout the purchase process, with a majority now preferring a low-friction, self-directed buying experience.

By the time someone reaches out to us, an AI search result, an agent, or a peer conversation may already have shaped their view of our brand, and we were never in the room for it.

So, the strategy question has changed from "how do we reach more people" to "how do we earn trust in places we do not control." We are investing less in broadcast and more in being findable, credible and complete wherever evaluation happens, whether online or offline.

Growth increasingly comes from depth that survives contact with an algorithm as much as a human. In cybersecurity specifically, where trust is the product before it's the pitch, that shift makes marketing a direct lever on the business, not a support function to it.

Brand Positioning in Competitive Market

Three years ago, differentiation meant a sharper campaign. Now it means being structurally ready for how AI decides what gets surfaced and trusted. I think about AI less as a productivity shortcut and more as a reason to rebuild how we market. The two mindsets lead to very different priority lists, and that gap is where real differentiation lives this year.

First, outcomes over output. We are moving budget conversations away from impressions and toward more measurable impact such as pipeline influenced, deals accelerated, retention protected.

These are the numbers a CFO recognizes. Second, category authority. When anyone can generate content quickly, a distinct, research-backed point of view is what still earns attention, so our research stays central to what we publish, not a side asset.

Third, as agentic commerce takes hold, we are preparing for buyers who aren't human at all. Brands need to be legible to the AI agents doing the comparing, not just to the people reading the comparison. Underneath all of it, the judgment stays human. AI can execute faster than we ever could but it still cannot decide what's worth saying

MAY MITCHELL
CMO
Qualys

Evolving Marketing Strategy for the AI Era

Marketing at Qualys is focused on driving business growth and pipeline contribution, operating as one go-to-market motion with Sales and Product, not in silos. We work together to reach our ideal customer profile (ICP) for new customer acquisition, and to retain and expand the contract lifecycle for existing customers, ultimately building advocates. Marketing creates the narrative, communicates it where customers look for information, and drives demand. We also provide the right tools for Sales and partners, and Product builds solutions that meet customers’ needs.

For prospective customers, our strategy hinges on understanding the different customer profiles – not everyone is at the same place in building out their Risk Operations Center (ROC). That’s where AI is very useful in providing the intelligence for customizing the narrative. AI helps us gain better visibility into what customers are looking for, prioritize who we reach out to, and adapt the narrative to the target audience, so we reach the right person at the right time.

For existing customers, it's about developing trust through strong integration and continuous education on new Qualys and partner capabilities as their needs evolve, like a doctor conducting ongoing health checks. By growing and evolving with them, this extends the customer lifecycle well past the initial sale — so customers see Qualys as strategic to their cyber risk management program, not just a vendor.

Brand Positioning in Competitive Market

Our priority is precision: our narrative must be simple, compelling, and urgent. Most of all, it needs to be a tailored message, customized to the person we are reaching. We do this by understanding the motivations of who we are speaking to and problems they need to address, validated through the same LLMs customers use to find solutions, while meeting them where they are in their cyber risk journey to build frontier AI readiness.

Cyber risk management today comes down to detecting vulnerabilities fast, prioritizing by business impact, and remediating at machine speed — and our messaging must match those pain points felt industry-wide. At the same time, we’re also enabling our partners to continue communicating that same message.

Effective customer marketing to our install base is vitally important for retention, expansion, and as a source for customer advocacy. That’s why it’s a key priority for us to sustain growth in today’s increasingly competitive market. Ultimately, it's product-market fit. We’re listening to our customers’ needs and pain points, communicating how our solutions can solve their issues, and why you should let Qualys show you.

DR. MITHILESH SINGH
Head of Marketing –
India & SAARC
CommScope India

Evolving Marketing Strategy for the AI Era

At CommScope India, our marketing strategy is increasingly centered on connecting market intelligence, customer needs, technology innovation and business outcomes. AI is accelerating this transformation. We are using data and AI-driven insights to better understand customer priorities, identify emerging opportunities, personalize engagement and improve the effectiveness of our campaigns. However, technology is only an enabler—the real objective is to translate insights into meaningful customer conversations and measurable business impact. For us, this also means moving closer to the sales and partner ecosystem. Marketing, sales and partners need to operate as one connected growth engine, with common priorities around pipeline creation, customer engagement and conversion. We are therefore placing greater emphasis on account-based engagement, industryspecific programs, technology workshops, executive engagement and partner-led initiatives. India is also a highly diverse market, and a one-size-fits-all approach does not work. Our strategy increasingly combines national brand-building with highly localized engagement across industries, customer segments and emerging markets.

Brand Positioning in Competitive Market

CommScope’s priorities are centered around three areas: relevance, differentiation and measurable impact. First, relevance. Marketing must start with a deep understanding of the customer's business environment. Whether it is data centers, intelligent buildings, enterprise networks or emerging digital infrastructure, our communication needs to address real business and technology challenges rather than simply promote products.

Second, differentiation. In a highly competitive technology market, product features alone are not enough. Differentiation comes from the combination of technology leadership, innovation, customer experience, ecosystem strength and the ability to translate technology into business value. Building a strong and credible brand therefore remains a strategic priority

Third, measurable impact. The modern marketing team must be accountable for business outcomes. We are increasingly looking at marketing through metrics such as pipeline influence, opportunity engagement, customer acquisition, partner engagement, conversion and customer experience—not just impressions, event attendance or campaign activity.

Ultimately, I believe our role as marketing leaders is to connect strategy with execution and brand with business performance. Marketing should be a catalyst that brings together customers, partners, sales teams, technology and market intelligence to create sustainable growth. In the AI-driven era, the winning organizations will not necessarily be those that simply adopt the most technology. They will be those that can combine technology, human insight and customer understanding to create meaningful and measurable value.

NEETHI RAVIKUMAR K
Senior Manager – Product
Marketing, IDfy

Evolving Marketing Strategy for the AI Era

For marketers, AI is no longer a future conversation. It is already changing how we research markets, understand customers, build campaigns, create content and measure performance. But the more interesting shift is not about efficiency alone. It is about how AI can help marketing become a sharper, more connected and more commercially relevant function.

As a community, we have spent years talking about becoming more customer-centric, more insightled and more accountable to business outcomes. AI gives us an opportunity to bring those ambitions together. It can help us process signals faster, learn from the market more continuously and make better decisions across the marketing lifecycle.

The real question, then, is not whether marketers should use AI. We already are. It is whether we are using it simply to do the same things faster, or to rethink how marketing creates growth.

The first wave of AI in marketing has naturally centred on productivity. Content generation, research, campaign optimisation and automation were easy places to begin. They delivered immediate value and gave teams the confidence to experiment.

The next phase will be more strategic.

Marketing teams sit on a remarkable amount of intelligence. Customer conversations, sales feedback, search behaviour, campaign performance, competitive activity, product usage and support interactions all tell us something about the market. The challenge has always been turning these fragmented signals into something useful quickly enough to act on.

AI can help us do that. It can allow marketing teams to identify recurring objections earlier, understand how customer language is changing, spot emerging needs and see which propositions are gaining traction. That intelligence can influence far more than a campaign. It can shape positioning, audience priorities, product conversations and where the business chooses to invest.

In that sense, AI is bringing marketing closer to the core of business decision-making.

POOJA VASHISHT
Head - Marketing &
Communications
Techno Digital

Evolving Marketing Strategy for the AI Era

Marketing is no longer only limited to brand building and demand generation; it is now expected to understand where the business wants to grow, build the pipeline to support that growth, influence go-to-market strategy and stay close to customer needs. This requires marketing to work across product, sales, partnerships, leadership and customer engagement. You cannot effectively market data centres, cloud, AI infrastructure or enterprise solutions without understanding the technology, the customer problem and the business opportunity behind it.

AI is accelerating this shift, but AI itself is not the strategy. It is an enabler that helps us analyse data faster, understand intent, personalize engagement and identify opportunities earlier.

Brand Positioning in Competitive Market

My first priority is clarity, in a market where most organizations have access to similar technologies, platforms and AI tools, differentiation comes from being clear about what the brand stands for, what problem it solves and why customers should believe it.

The second is accountability, Marketing must connect its activity to qualified conversations, pipeline, sales progression, customer engagement and partner outcomes. Impressions and engagement matter, but they cannot be the end of the conversation.

The third is leadership, In B2B, customers often experience the organization through its leaders long before they experience its products. Credible executive voices are therefore an important part of brand building and market differentiation.

Technology-driven Trust, Partner Ecosystems, and Customer Experience

AI and data help us understand customer behaviour, identify intent, personalize engagement and measure how marketing activity translates into meaningful business conversations. Digital channels allow us to reach the right audiences with greater relevance and precision.

But technology cannot replace trust. In B2B technology, decisions involving infrastructure, cloud or AI are complex, high-value and long term. Customers and partners do not choose an organization because of one perfectly personalized communication. They choose it because they trust its expertise, credibility and ability to deliver.

My approach is simple, use AI to understand better, data to decide better and digital channels to reach better but use people to build trust. The same applies to partner ecosystems. Technology can identify an opportunity; relationships determine what organisations can build together.

SPARSH SEHGAL
Chief Growth Officer
Sparsh CCTV

Evolving Marketing Strategy for the AI Era

The role of marketing has fundamentally evolved. It is no longer limited to creating awareness or generating demand; it is increasingly about understanding where the market is heading and translating those insights into business growth opportunities. At Sparsh CCTV, our marketing approach is evolving from traditional product-led communication towards solution-led and insightdriven engagement. The surveillance industry is moving rapidly from conventional video monitoring towards AI-enabled, connected and intelligent security ecosystems. As a growth function, our objective is to ensure that marketing creates meaningful conversations with customers and partners, builds market confidence and ultimately contributes to sustainable business growth.

Brand Positioning in Competitive Market

For me, the key is to ensure that marketing is directly connected to business growth. Brand visibility is important, but the real value of marketing comes when that visibility translates into stronger customer consideration, partner engagement, business conversations and sustainable revenue opportunities.

I see three priorities. First, differentiation through technology ownership and credibility. In a competitive technology market, differentiation cannot rely only on product features. It has to come from R&D, engineering capability, cybersecurity, compliance, manufacturing depth and the ability to solve complex customer requirements.

Second, moving from product communication to solution and outcome-led communication. Customers increasingly want to understand what technology can help them achieve. Our role is therefore to demonstrate how intelligent surveillance can contribute to safer infrastructure, operational efficiency, better situational awareness and faster decision-making.

Third, measurable marketing. We are increasingly focused on connecting marketing investments with meaningful business indicators quality of engagement, customer conversations, partner participation, digital performance, opportunity creation and ultimately business growth.

For Sparsh, differentiation is also closely linked to our identity as an Indian technology company. We have been building CCTV technology in India since 2008, and our journey has evolved from indigenous manufacturing towards R&D, AI, cybersecurity, intelligent surveillance and integrated technology ecosystems. As a CGO, my view is that the next phase of technology marketing will be about connecting market intelligence, technology, customer experience and commercial execution. Marketing has to be close enough to the market to identify opportunities, and close enough to the business to help convert those opportunities into measurable outcomes.

UNNI KRISHNAN
Head of Marketing
Sify Technologies

Evolving Marketing Strategy for the AI Era

We believe marketing today goes beyond brand awareness and lead generation. It is about shaping market perception, creating differentiated positioning, and translating business strategy into meaningful customer engagement and measurable growth. As enterprises move from AI experimentation to large-scale adoption and Agentic AI, the conversation is shifting from deploying AI models to reimagining business operations around intelligent agents. This requires a trusted, secure and scalable foundation to build, run and govern AI. This is driving Sify’s brand transformation. We aspire to position Sify as the AI Foundation Partner for enterprises and our partner ecosystem, enabling businesses to embrace AI with confidence.

At the India AI Impact Summit in February 2026, we articulated our positioning around “Build. Run. Govern. AI at Scale,” showcasing our Sovereign AI Foundation and Sovereign AI in a Box.

Our new brand campaign, “Your Move,” brings this philosophy to life. It puts the power of choice in the hands of technology leaders, enabling them to decide where, when and how they enter the AI landscape. Whether it is AI-ready infrastructure, sovereign AI, cloud, cybersecurity or Agentic AI, our role is to simplify the choices and enable enterprises to move at their own pace.

Our marketing is becoming increasingly industry-led, account-centric and insight-driven, connecting our OneSify capabilities to specific business challenges and outcomes. Equally, we believe the real opportunity lies in bringing AI and human intelligence together combining the scale and speed of AI with human judgment, creativity and experience.

Brand Positioning in Competitive Market

Our brand positioning is rooted in a simple belief: AI and human intelligence must complement each other. Our focus is on co-creating solutions with customers, bringing deeper customer insights and translating technology into meaningful business outcomes.

We are scaling our Build. Run. Govern. AI at Scale proposition through our Your Move campaign, offering enterprises the flexibility to choose solutions across their AI journey, based on their needs and readiness. Our role is to simplify these choices and enable customers to move at their own pace.

Equally important is preserving Sify’s heritage while transforming for the future. We still see an “aha” moment when customers remember Sify as India’s first ISP, connecting the country to the world of information. That legacy is an enormous part of our brand’s emotional equity. Our ambition is to carry that trust forward while evolving into a modern AI brand.

VARUN SINGH
Marketing Consultant Optoma
Technology (India)

Evolving Marketing Strategy for the AI Era

AI is transforming marketing from a function focused on communication and campaign execution The marketing era is evolving fast. It is not only about brand awareness anymore, it has to take part in getting growth and find out what are customers' expectations and desires. We are using AI and data technology to gain better understanding of consumer behavior, enhance targeting and ensure our communication is relevant. At the same time, we want to preserve the human side of marketing. Telling interesting stories, establishing strong relationships with customers and having a proper grasp of the market remain very important. Thus, we aim to combine these component—applying advanced technologies and making the customer the main point.

Brand Positioning in Competitive Market

Our objective today is to provide a unique selling offer based on our solid understanding of the customer’s issues we work on. In the world where each technology company speaks about the same subjects (AI, automation, transformational change), being just a speaker and saying nothing meaningful will not lead to success anymore. We must be able to demonstrate strong business results and benefits. We are also trying to make our marketing more measurable by not limiting ourselves to traditional metrics of success and attempting to discover how marketing influences the sales pipeline and the growth of the customer base. Additionally, one more focus for us now consists in building an AIcentered marketing structure where technology makes our work more efficient while human capabilities still remain the key elements of our business processes.

Technology-driven Trust, Partner Ecosystems, and Customer Experience

At Optoma, we see AI, data analytics and digital channels not simply as marketing tools, but as enablers of a more connected ecosystem across customers, channel partners and our internal teams. Our approach is to use technology to make the customer journey more relevant, transparent and responsive, while helping our partners make better business decisions. AI is increasingly becoming an important part of how customers discover and evaluate technology. We are therefore strengthening our digital content across search, social media and AI-led discovery platforms with richer product information, application-based content, comparisons, FAQs and real-world use cases.

Data analytics is equally important in understanding market and customer behaviour. We analyse campaign performance, search trends, website engagement, product interest and channel-level market insights to understand what customers are actually looking for. For our channel partners, digitalisation is about enabling business rather than replacing the channel. Partners remain a critical part of the customer journey, particularly in the professional AV, education and enterprise segments where consultation, demonstration, installation and after-sales support are important. We are using digital platforms, product content, training initiatives and data-led communication to give partners better access to product knowledge, marketing assets and customer insights.

VINNY SHARMA
Senior Director- Global,
Field & Channel
Marketing, Securonix

Evolving Marketing Strategy for the AI Era

We are spending less time talking about AI as a category and more time showing what it can actually do We are spending less time talking about AI as a category and more time showing what it can actually do for a security team. Customers want to understand whether AI can help them investigate faster, reduce repetitive work, improve response, and give analysts more time to focus on higher-value decisions. That gives us a more practical way to talk about Sam, our AI SOC Analyst, because Sam performs work across triage, investigation, and response while analysts remain in control.

We are also creating more opportunities to hear directly from customers, partners, and security leaders. Securonix SPARK is a good example. It gives us a forum for candid discussion around our products, customer experience, and broader market priorities. Those conversations help shape our messaging, our programs, and, in some cases, the product itself.

The Elevate Partner Program plays a similar role within our partner ecosystem. Growth in this market depends on strong relationships, shared value, and giving partners a clear way to take the Securonix story to customers.

Technology-driven Trust, Partner Ecosystems, and Customer Experience

Trust is central to how we talk about AI. Customers want to understand what the AI is doing, why it is taking an action, and where human judgment remains part of the process. With Securonix, Sam performs defined work across triage, investigation, and response within the Agentic Mesh, with governance and human oversight built into the process. That makes the conversation around AI much more concrete and easier for customers to evaluate.

On the marketing side, data helps us understand which issues customers care about, how they engage with us, and where their priorities are changing. We use those insights to improve our content, sharpen our campaigns, and make the overall customer experience more relevant.

Digital channels help us maintain those conversations through customer stories, webinars, social content, thought leadership, and direct engagement. SPARK adds another layer by giving us a direct feedback loop with customers and partners, which helps us improve how we communicate and how we engage with them.