Google's James Manyika just dropped some serious insights at Davos 2026 about India's unique position in the AI landscape. And before you roll your eyes at another "AI will change everything" hot take, this one actually matters for marketers who are trying to figure out where to place their bets.
Forget the tired narrative about India being the world's call center. Manyika's pointing to something more fundamental: India's ability to apply AI at scale across diverse, complex problems. We're talking about a market with 1.4 billion people, dozens of languages, and economic conditions that span from Silicon Valley-level tech hubs to rural communities still coming online.
This isn't just academic. For marketers, India represents the ultimate testing ground for AI applications that need to work in messy, real-world conditions. If your AI-powered marketing can handle the complexity of Indian markets, it can probably handle anything.
Scale matters more than perfection. Indian companies are getting really good at deploying AI solutions that work for millions of users simultaneously, even when those users have wildly different needs and behaviors. This approach prioritizes practical results over theoretical elegance - something Western marketing teams could learn from.
The implications are huge for global brands trying to crack emerging markets. Instead of treating India as an afterthought market where you dump simplified versions of your Western campaigns, smart marketers are starting to see it as an innovation lab for AI-powered localization and personalization at scale.
Here's where it gets interesting for marketing technologists: India's AI advantage isn't just about having smart engineers (though they do). It's about necessity driving innovation in ways that comfortable Western markets don't experience.
When you need to serve customers who speak different languages, have varying literacy levels, and access your content through everything from high-end smartphones to basic feature phones, you get really good at building AI that adapts and works efficiently under constraints.
This constraint-driven innovation is producing marketing AI tools that are more robust, more efficient, and frankly more useful than the resource-heavy solutions many Western companies are building.
Manyika's comments come at a time when the AI race is heating up globally. While the US focuses on developing the most powerful models and China pushes for AI dominance through scale and control, India's taking a different approach: focusing on practical applications that solve real problems for real people.
For marketing leaders, this suggests a strategic opportunity. Partnerships and investments in Indian AI applications might give you access to solutions that are battle-tested in ways that lab-perfect Western AI simply isn't.
Stop treating emerging markets as simplified versions of your primary markets. Start looking at them as complexity laboratories where AI solutions either work or fail fast.
If you're running marketing for a global brand, consider piloting your next AI initiative in India rather than your home market. The feedback loop will be faster, the stakes lower, and the learnings more applicable to other challenging markets.
And if you're a marketing technology vendor, pay attention to what's coming out of Indian AI labs. The solutions being built to handle India's complexity might just be exactly what you need for your own diverse customer base.