81% of Marketers in India have Adopted AI, But Unified Data Will Determine Who Wins Customer Engagement

92% of marketers say customers in India increasingly expect brands to support two-way, back-and-forth conversations.

86% of marketers would trust AI to respond to customers to help scale efforts — but are held back by disjointed or irrelevant data

MUMBAI, India — July 7, 2026: Salesforce, the #1 Agentic AI CRM*, today launched the India findings from its Tenth Edition State of Marketing report, which revealed that 81% of marketers in India have adopted AI, but unified customer data will determine who wins customer engagement.

The research suggests that the roadblock isn’t lack of effort: it’s the lack of usable data. Siloed systems and poor data quality remain the top barriers to the promises of AI-driven personalization. In fact, while 86% of marketers say they would trust AI to respond to customers and help scale engagement, many remain constrained by disjointed or irrelevant customer data.

The good news is: marketers with unified customer data have an early advantage over those with disjointed data sources. Marketing teams that have satisfactorily unified their data are 1.4x more likely to regularly respond to customers than those that aren’t fully satisfied with their data foundations. They are also 1.6x more likely to use AI agents to help scale their efforts.

Nishant Kalra, Vice President – Sales, Salesforce South Asia, said “The biggest barrier to personalization today isn’t AI, it’s the quality and connectedness of the data that powers it. As AI agents become the next frontier of marketing, organizations need a trusted, unified view of the customer to deliver contextual, real-time engagement at scale. The future of marketing lies in moving beyond one-way campaigns to intelligent, two-way conversations that build stronger, lasting customer relationships.”

Dig deeper

Data is the biggest personalization bottleneck

• Cross-departmental silos restrict marketers in one-way communications.
  • 92% of marketers say customers now expect two-way conversations — the ability to reply to a marketing message and get an actual response. But 71% of marketers struggle to respond promptly because they can’t access the context they need.
  • Only 60% have complete access to service data, 61% to sales data, and 58% to commerce data.

• Marketers look to AI to scale personalization efforts.
  • 83% of marketers say they need more personalized content than they’re able to produce and nearly as many (81%) are turning to AI to help close the gap.
  • Perhaps unsurprisingly, their top AI use case is personalizing content.
  • AI can help scale personalization efforts, but the research shows most marketers are still getting tripped up: 98% of marketers hit barriers to personalization, and data issues are the most common culprits. The top barriers are as follows:
    • Regulations and/or privacy concerns
    • Poor data quality (e.g., inaccurate or unstructured data)
    • Lack of technical expertise

• High performers have narrowed this gap.
  • A notable exception: marketers using AI agents report higher satisfaction with cross-functional data access. Whether that’s because deploying agents forced them to unify data first, or because the agents themselves improved connectivity, isn’t clear.
    • 76% of marketers with AI are satisfied with their ability to connect touchpoints compared to 55% of those without AI.
  • High performing marketers are 1.7 times more likely to use customer data to create relevant experiences and 1.7 times more likely to have unified their data sources.

AI rewrites the rules of discovery and engagement

• Marketers are caught between old playbooks and new realities
  • Nearly two-thirds (66%) say they’re struggling to keep up with changing customer behaviors, and 47% haven’t figured out how to adapt their strategies to the widespread use of AI.
• Customer behaviors – and expectations — are already measurably different thanks to AI
  • Half of all Google searches now feature AI summaries that bypass brand websites entirely — shrinking the top of the marketing funnel — while customers increasingly consult LLMs for purchase decisions.
  • 91% of marketers have observed that AI is raising customer expectations, with 92% of marketers noting customers increasingly expect two-way conversations across all channels

• Spotlight: Answer Engine Optimization (AEO): the two-way conversation consumers are already having
  • The majority (91%) of marketers say AI is reshaping their SEO strategy, and 92% have already begun optimizing for AI-generated responses for places like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overview.
  • Intriguingly: while it’s harder for marketers to capture attention when AI synthesizes answers from multiple sources, the resulting customer engagement is more personalized and specific, signaling high intent.
  • High performing marketers — those who get the highest returns on their marketing spend — are 2.2 times more likely than underperformers to have optimized for AI search.

Explore Further:

• Read the full State of Marketing report for the latest perspectives on AI, data, and personalization
• Learn how to act on every customer message in real time with Agentforce Marketing
• Discover how customers like PepsiCo use Agentforce to power personalized marketing across their many brands
• See how UChicago Medicine’s marketing team uses Agentforce to run targeted campaigns that help save lives.

Methodology:

Data in this report are from a double-anonymous survey conducted from October 8 to November 17, 2025. The survey generated 4,450 responses from marketing decision makers  (250 from India) across North America, Latin America, Asia-Pacific, and Europe.

Performance levels referenced in the report were determined as follows: high performers reported complete satisfaction with the overall outcomes of their marketing investments. Moderate performers reported high satisfaction with the overall outcomes of their marketing investments. Underperformers reported moderate or less satisfaction with the overall outcomes of their marketing investments.