This December, my editor at MxMIndia asked me to look ahead, spot the trends that will shape the coming year, and offer readers a sense of what might matter. Normally such an exercise produces a predictable cluster of themes — shifts in consumer sentiment, changes in media consumption, the evolving role of influencers, regulatory rumblings, retail innovations, the rise or fall of platforms, and so on.
But this year, after reviewing what has unfolded across technology, media, business and culture, I find myself arriving at a different conclusion. There is really only one trend that matters for 2026, and it will overshadow all the others. It is the question of AI and agency — specifically, how much agency artificial intelligence will acquire in the business of marketing and media, and how much agency humans will willingly surrender to it. Everything else is secondary.
I wrote about AI and agency back in 2019 when it was in the realm of speculation. Today it is a fast emerging reality.
This is not because AI will replace marketers or media professionals. It is because AI is becoming woven into the very processes that drive marketing — research, insight, segmentation, content creation, optimisation, media planning, and measurement — in ways we did not anticipate even three years ago. The year ahead will not be defined by what AI can do, but by what we will allow it to decide.
And that is a different kind of disruption.
To understand what awaits us, it is useful to consider how far we have travelled since 2019. When I first wrote about whether AI should be given anything resembling agency, the question felt abstract. AI was already powerful, but it behaved like a sophisticated tool — predictive, helpful, occasionally impressive, yet firmly under human direction. The marketing world treated AI as an assistant: automating bidding strategies, generating variations of ads, helping with customer service chat flows. Interesting, but not existential.
By the end of 2025, that comfort has faded. AI has advanced, yes — but more importantly, it has become entangled with the workflows, decisions and interactions that shape modern marketing. It no longer waits passively for instructions. AI agents now draft campaign plans, analyse competitive landscapes, write scripts, generate layouts, refine audience clusters, model outcomes, and negotiate budgets with other AI agents inside large organisations.
In other words, the relationship between human and machine is no longer linear. It is a mesh of entangled intelligences — human-to-AI, AI-to-human, and increasingly AI-to-AI.
This is not sci-fi; it is already happening inside the larger digital-first marketing teams and martech stacks of global brands. AI agents change the nature of agency itself.
They break down goals, execute tasks across platforms, evaluate results, and loop back with recommendations. They schedule content releases. They run A/B tests at speeds no human team can match. They adjust budgets in real time. They revise messaging based on behavioural signals emerging minute by minute.
None of these actions involve “consciousness”. But they do involve decision-making — or at least the operational equivalent of decision-making.
If a system chooses which segments to prioritise, which messages to push, which customer to re-engage, or which creative to suppress, then it is participating in the business in a way that materially shapes outcomes. That is agency, whether we call it that or not.
More importantly, this agency is increasingly interconnected. Marketing agents talk to sales agents; creative agents revise outputs from analytics agents; procurement agents negotiate terms based on forecasts generated by planning agents. Humans remain in the loop, but not always at the centre of it.
As a result, campaign planning and execution are beginning to resemble a distributed conversation among interacting intelligences, with humans guiding direction rather than manually controlling each decision. In 2026, this will accelerate.
The creative side of marketing is changing just as quickly. Generative AI tools that once produced amusing text or quirky images now create full campaigns, iterate on brand worlds, simulate consumer reactions, and produce thousands of creative variations aligned to micro-segments. Agencies are beginning to reconfigure themselves around hybrid teams — human strategists and creators working alongside AI systems that handle volume, variation and velocity. The question here is not whether AI will replace creative professionals. It will not.
But AI’s growing role in ideation and execution raises an important issue: when a concept emerges from a collaborative loop between human and machine, who is the creative prime mover? And how does that shift the nature of brand-building? These are questions of agency, not just capability.
Media, too, is entering an unprecedented phase of automation. Programmatic buying was only an early precursor to the agent-driven media ecosystems taking shape. Adaptive media agents already optimise across channels, cut underperforming platforms, increase emphasis on emerging cohorts, and adjust spend dynamically to ROAS signals. The next phase will involve AI agents handling cross-platform negotiations, planning multi-quarter cycles and managing complex attribution loops. In such an environment, the notion of “media strategy” becomes more about guiding high-level intent and less about specifying granular allocations. The craft remains, but it shifts upward. Again, this is not about job loss. It is about the relocation of agency — from human judgement to machine-led optimisation pipelines.
This creates obvious conveniences. Campaigns become more efficient. Insights become richer. Creative becomes more adaptive. Media becomes more accountable. But the risks for marketers and agencies are not the ones that dominate popular discourse.
Further AI’s agency will change consumer behaviour in ways that will shift the very marketing and advertising paradigms. Already the web’s very plumbing is set to change to accommodate the growing use of AI in the day-to-day life of consumers. The aim of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) developed by Anthropic, to give AI agents a standardised way to communicate, allowing them to act for an individual across function s like shopping, travel bookings, emailing etc. The concept of Concierge Intelligence that I speculated about back in 2022 will probably be a reality at 2026 or 2027.
The danger in marketing and advertising or in the larger realm of business, as of yet, is not that AI will seize agency. The danger is that humans will abdicate it — unintentionally, incrementally, because it is easier. Once a process is delegated to an AI system, familiarity with that process often erodes. Over time, marketing teams may find themselves dependent on decision pipelines they do not fully understand. The system becomes a black box that produces results — until the day it doesn’t, at which point the human teams may lack the ability to intervene meaningfully.
Already, in some organisations, the first draft of a campaign is written by AI, the targeting is determined by AI, the optimisation is run by AI and the reporting is interpreted by yet another AI. The human team supervises, approves and questions — but from a growing distance.
In 2026, the central challenge for the marketing industry will not be AI competence. It will be AI governance. Not in a regulatory sense alone, but in a managerial sense: What should be automated? What should remain human-led? What should be shared? These decisions will separate organisations that thrive from those that drift. Some entanglements, of course, are beneficial. AI expands the space of ideas. It enables faster experimentation. It democratises access to high-quality tools. It reveals patterns humans often miss. And it supports creativity by removing tedious steps from the process. But entanglement also creates dependency. The more marketing systems rely on AI-to-AI interactions, the harder it becomes to disentangle them when something goes wrong.
The question, therefore, is no longer whether AI should have agency. It already does — in small, operational, but cumulatively significant ways. The real question is: how much agency will we allow AI to exercise in shaping brands, messages, consumer experience and business outcomes? That will be the defining marketing issue of 2026.
Some would say that Indian marketing and advertising is behind the curve in the use of AI. Not so. In fact, a many multinational corporates and large agency groups run GCCs and as a result their local operations are ahead of the curve.
Looking to the year ahead, we can, if we wish, produce lists of trends — the growth of vernacular video, the evolution of influencer networks, the rise of new payment ecosystems, the rural digital boom, the shift to privacy-first targeting, the collapse of third-party cookies, the emergence of mixed-reality retail, and so on. All of these will matter. But they will matter less than the underlying force reorganising the entire field.
Marketing in 2026 will be shaped by the redistribution of agency across a network of entangled intelligences — human and machine, machine and machine, and human learning from both. In 2019, when I first wrote about AI and agency, I imagined we had ample time to debate the philosophical issues. Now, it is the practical questions that demand attention. Not what AI can do, but what AI will be allowed to decide. The future of marketing will not be determined by AI’s intelligence alone, but by our choices about where to place responsibility, how to design boundaries, and when to insist on human judgment.
These choices, more than any trend, will shape 2026.
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