Digital
Lets get comfortable with the ‘Grey’: an invitation to marketers in the age of AI – Inspire, innovate, integrate with MMA Impact’ 2024
Mumbai – MMA Global India’s IMPACT Mumbai event concluded recently, and it was a huge success. The event took place on 24 April in Mumbai and focused on the impact of AI on marketing. It delivered a series of groundbreaking insights that redefined AI-driven marketing strategies and expanded the horizons of traditional marketing frameworks through new partnerships and insightful discussions. The event received industry-wide accolades for the cutting-edge quality of content and the stellar line-up of speakers who provided valuable insights to the attendees.
Key Highlights from MMA IMPACT Mumbai:
. Kickstarting with an inspiring address by Prasanth Kumar, MMA India Co-Chair & CEO, South Asia, GroupM, this session also featured Tushar Vyas, Chief Strategy Officer, WPP India & President, GroupM South Asia, moderated by Shibani Gharat, Anchor, CNBC – TV18. They dissected the AI adoption lifecycle, providing a clear pathway for marketers to evolve with AI-driven capabilities.
. Parul Bajaj, Managing Director & Partner, Boston Consulting Group, delivered a compelling keynote session on AI-Powered Marketing and Commerce. The session dove deep into how CMOs are thinking about AI, the highest impact AI-led use cases and the most critical factors that will be needed to succeed in this journey.
. A panel featuring Senior Marketers from HDFC Bank, Marico, DSP Mutual Fund, moderated by Devika Sharma, MMA India Board Member; VP and GM – India, InMobi, explored beyond conventional AI applications, showcasing how AI fosters deeper consumer connections and smarter experiences.
. Vijay Iyer, MMA India Board Member; Director, Amazon Ads India, illuminated the shift to Retail Media 2.0, emphasizing its transformative impact on marketing funnels and consumer interaction.
. Rohit Bhasin, MMA India Board Member; President and CMO, Kotak Mahindra Bank, articulated the strategic integration of AI in business practices. “AI is not just a technological upgrade; it is a paradigm shift in understanding customer intricacies and delivering on their expectations with unprecedented precision,” commented Bhasin.
. Rajeev Raja, Founder and Soundsmith, BrandMusiq, began his address with enchanting tunes, going on to then delve into the emotional dimensions of AI in sonic branding and highlighting its profound impact on digital consumer engagements.
. Experts from Nielsen, ITC, and India Today tackled the evolving metrics of media measurement in a ‘crumbling’ cookieless world, outlining the next steps for data privacy and accuracy with a tinge of humor.
. The session with AI Advisory members from Netcore Cloud, Tata Consumer Products, Microsoft, and JioAds and ReBid broke down real-world AI applications, offering tangible examples that underscore AI’s versatility across market sectors.
. A pivotal discussion on ethical AI deployment featured Marketing Leaders from Glassbox Ventures, Mondelez, House of Masaba, and Publicis Production, moderated by Pratik Gupta, MMA India Board Member; Founding Partner, Zoo Media, emphasizing the much-debated responsible AI use within marketing frameworks.
. Sunita Bangard, MMA India Board Member; Group Head – Consumer Insights and Brand Development, Aditya Birla Group, and leaders from Federal Bank, TATA AIA, Beam Suntory, Raymond, and EY outlined why marketers have a “seat at the table” in the growth of AI. This session have a cutting-edge perspective on the AI-marketer relationship in India – shedding light on how “marketers are evolving to media companies”.
. Leading practitioners of Generative AI from Affle, SAS, Haptik, and Accenture tackled frequently asked questions about GenAI. They provided clarity and actionable insights for marketers looking to adopt these tools, showcasing how AI will augment marketers rather than replace them.
Moneka Khurana, Country Head & BOD Member, MMA Global India, set a transformative agenda, encouraging the industry to get comfortable with the ‘grey’ .As she said in her opening remarks, “Let’s embrace the grey areas and ambiguity, as it is in these spaces where true innovation and wisdom lie. It might not be easy to do this alone, so the best way is to join hands and walk the path together, enabled through MMA communities and platforms like Impact. As we know, AI will continue to permeate our lives and be our co-pilot, with you being on the driver’s seat. At Impact, we debunk numerous myths, decode hard questions, and bolster confidence to navigate through uncertainties with collective intelligence. This allows us to see ambiguity as a growth opportunity, backed by a curated agenda to address deep-rooted aspects of how marketers can walk the talk and leverage it for business outcomes.”
AI is fundamentally reshaping the way we approach business. It’s not just enhancing our existing processes; it’s revolutionizing how we envision growth and success. With AI, we can make informed decisions that minimize costs and maximize efficiency. By integrating AI into our core strategies, we unlock unprecedented growth opportunities and move beyond traditional boundaries to discover new potentials in marketing and customer engagement.
As IMPACT Mumbai 2024 drew to a close, participants left not just with enhanced knowledge but with actionable strategies to harness AI within their marketing frameworks. The day-long conference cooled off with a lavish soiree with drinks, snacks and networking – an exclusive marketer-only gathering of C-suite execs.
Digital
Google partners with Adani and Airtel to build India’s largest AI data centre
The three-campus complex, built with Adani and Airtel, is India’s largest-ever technology infrastructure investment
Visakhapatnam: Google has broken ground on what it is billing as India’s largest-ever technology infrastructure project: a gigawatt-scale artificial intelligence hub in Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh, built in partnership with AdaniConneX and Nxtra by Airtel. The ceremony at Tarluvada on 28th April marked the start of construction on a three-campus data centre complex that sits at the heart of a $15 billion investment Google has committed to deploying across India between 2026 and 2030.
The numbers are staggering by any measure. Nearly 1 gigawatt of compute capacity at a single location, three data centre campuses, a fibre-optic expansion under the America-India Connect initiative, and a long-term clean energy strategy designed to feed new renewable supply into the national grid. Google says the project will help India hit its target of 500 gigawatts of non-fossil fuel capacity by 2030 while delivering the high-performance, low-latency infrastructure that businesses need to build and scale AI-powered services.
The groundbreaking drew a formidable gathering of political and corporate India. Union minister for information technology Ashwini Vaishnaw, Andhra Pradesh chief minister N. Chandrababu Naidu and state IT minister Nara Lokesh attended alongside Google Cloud chief executive Thomas Kurian, Adani Group directors Karan Adani and Jeet Adani, and Bharti Enterprises vice chairman Rakesh Mittal.
Vaishnaw framed the project in terms of national ambition. “The India AI hub and three subsea cables landing in Visakhapatnam will become very important infrastructure for the country’s journey forward,” he said, adding his thanks to Google for its “continued trust in India.” Naidu was equally bullish, describing Andhra Pradesh as “India’s premier investment destination” and the Vizag hub as a cornerstone of the state’s technology corridor. “Our vision goes beyond attracting investment,” he said. “We want local talent, startups, and enterprises to become active partners in this technology-driven growth story.”
Kurian called the groundbreaking “a powerful realization of our shared vision with the Indian government, and an inflection point for the country’s AI-native future.” Jeet Adani was characteristically direct: “When energy becomes more affordable and increasingly powered by clean sources, intelligence becomes more accessible, and that is how India will lead the next phase of digital growth.” Gopal Vittal, executive vice chairman of Bharti Airtel, said the full stack of data centres, green power, pan-India fibre and a next-generation cable landing station would enable “large-scale, world-class AI infrastructure in Vizag.”
The project was first announced in October 2025. AdaniConneX and Nxtra by Airtel will lead construction of the data centre buildings and connecting infrastructure, with Google deploying its AI capabilities on top.
Beyond the hardware, Google has announced a substantial package of community programmes. On water, it is partnering with Sponge Collaborative on a watershed management plan linking coastal ecosystem restoration with clean drinking water systems, including reverse osmosis plants and Water ATMs, for local residents. On livelihoods, a tie-up with the Sambhav Foundation will equip more than 1,000 fisherfolk with GPS navigation, weather-forecasting tools, cold-chain management training and UPI-based financial literacy. The Google Udaan India Fund, run through ChangeX, will provide direct grants to local schools and social enterprises for AI skilling labs and digital literacy programmes. The NARI Shakti programme, developed with the Learning Links Foundation, will support more than 10,000 women entrepreneurs from low-income backgrounds in building micro-enterprises. The Skills Trade and Readiness programme will prepare more than 1,000 local workers for construction, welding and facility operations roles, while a parallel tie-up with ICT Academy will train more than 1,200 students and educators in cloud computing and generative AI.
The groundbreaking was accompanied by the Bharat AI Shakti Conclave, a conference organised with the Andhra Pradesh government and Nara Lokesh, bringing together suppliers, industry partners and infrastructure firms to map how Google’s anchor investment can be turned into a broader economic value chain for the region. The conclave’s central theme was building an AI industrial corridor, with a local-first procurement approach and the integration of regional small and medium enterprises into Google’s global operational frameworks.
Every major technology company in the world has been courting India. What sets Vizag apart is the sheer scale of the commitment and the deliberate effort to build an industrial ecosystem around it rather than simply plant servers in a field. Google is not just betting on India’s digital future; it is trying to build the factory floor on which that future gets made. Whether the $15 billion translates into genuine local opportunity, or merely into an impressive data centre humming quietly on the Andhra Pradesh coast, will depend on whether those community programmes prove as durable as the hardware. The groundbreaking, as ever, is the easy part.
