What you need to know:

• Talent empowerment is crucial to taking AI beyond an efficiency play and into the more lucrative areas of experience and effectiveness in marketing, says Infosys global CMO, Sumit Virmani. But he’s worried it’s not getting enough focus right now.
• Experimenting at scale, building confidence in using the tools, taking teams out of their dayto-day and ultimately, success-based KPIs, are all critical to taking a non-AI marketing organisation into the era of AI, he says.
• Yet the shorter term issues of an economic crunch, plus pressure to relentlessly optimise and cut marketing costs are all playing a significant role on how well marketing teams can focus on the longerterm brand plays that are ultimately what the job of marketing is all about, Virmani says.
• As part of the IT services company’s own multiyear brand partnership with the Australian Open, AI-first experiences were front and centre over “brand slapping” because they’re critical to demonstrating what Infosys can do for its broader client base, he adds.

The thumping disruption AI unleashes on marketing makes it imperative all CMOs boost team empowerment and find longer-term experience and effectiveness plays that truly matter to the business. Yet Infosys global CMO, Sumit Virmani, worries talent enfranchisement is woefully underfunded right now.

Speaking to Mi3 as the IT services giant embarked on its seventh annual partnership with the Australian Open, Virmani made it clear he sees the real potential of AI for marketers coming from higher-order use cases – take scaled personalisation as one long sought-after example. In turn, these can elevate marketing’s impact and strategic stature in the organisation, he agrees.  

“Marketing is about two things and two things alone: Defining where to play and enabling how to win,” he says, quoting  management luminary, Professor Roger L Martin. "Marketers might be the guardians of the brand, the ambassadors of the brand, and they might have the responsibility of driving day-to-day performance marketing. But at the end of the day, marketing is all about ensuring growth, ensuring market share growth in the long term, and delivering price premium and profitability.

“For marketing to succeed in the long term, it has to succeed with measures that matter to the business. Only then will marketing play the role of being an equal c-suite partner for other leaders in the boardroom. In several senses, AI only makes that aspiration a lot easier by leveraging technology.”

However, getting to this point requires marketers to use AI to disrupt marketing strategy itself, Virmani says. “Using AI for driving productivity is fantastic, and we've seen the results of that over the last 18 months. But productivity, in my view, is just the low hanging fruit,” he continues. “I believe it’s going to democratise creativity in a way that has never been done before, and actually elevate the average level of creativity across marketing organisations by virtue of the power that AI issues.

“But most importantly, if marketing is about measuring what matters and about enabling growth, then the promise of effectiveness through marketing and personalisation via AI-powered marketing – something we marketers have been hoping for over the last decade – can soon be a reality. That is the reason why AI will be possibly the single biggest disruption marketing leaders would have seen in their careers.”

For Virmani, the only way to really embrace AI in this way is to experiment at scale. At any one point in time, he cites half a dozen going on in AI in his team. “It requires a pool of investment to keep pumping into experiments and pilots that will give you the confidence and comfort with something so disruptive,” he says.

Yet this is where Virmani’s concerns around talent investment and management become all-too palpable.

“Marketers may not be spending enough time on empowering their teams,” he says. “Most of us have teams that have been built over the years in the age of non-AI. All of these people have been traditional marketers. As AI is a very new technology, it can be a big challenge for teams at large to embrace because they don’t know how to do it. Educating them in the process of embracing AI, on the tools, and actually making investments in your team to get them the comfort to experiment, is the responsibility of a marketing leadership team. It’s this combination that’s going to make truly democratised and available for experiments that can scale.”

What empowering a marketing team to embrace AI actually involves

So how exactly is Virmani doing this with his own marketing team?

The first step has been taking his entire team out of their day-to-day work and putting them in a room for three days to be immersed in AI. To help, he recruited an AI expert to jointly curate a three-day workshop which sought to understand the entire marketing lifecycle and how AI tools are going to impact on what parts of that lifecycle. Also key was sharing real-life examples at every stage of this lifecycle where other brands are introducing AI, as well as how Infosys more broadly has been experimenting with AI.

“It was about showing them [the marketing team] the processes, the tools, and the outcomes from these tools to be able to instil some confidence,” Virmani explains. “Once that process was done, it was about getting some of the tools into the ecosystem and letting the team play with them. Thirdly, it was about more encouragement – I would not use the word mandate yet, because we are not truly evaluating them on this – by saying over the next three months, we would like you to at least try one experiment in your space of work and see how that plays out. Then, on a monthly and quarterly basis, we share all the good work that has happened across teams back with them to give them the confidence that ok, it might not have worked for you, but it worked for somebody else and can you learn from that.”

The longer-term ambition – one still to be realised – is to make AI utilisation part of team success KPIs.

“What we would like to then do is take it to a place where we can say ok for this year, X percentage of your success will be evaluated with the innovation you’ve taken on AI,” says Virmani. “Enablement, sharing of a lot of information, encouragement and celebrating success would be great ways to democratise it.”

Virmani recognises the need for “a lot of hand-holding” throughout such a process. “This is changing the very structure of what you have learnt for decades,” he says. “It has to be a step-by-step change management process with the right empowerment, the right encouragement, the right incentives and the right rewards.”

AI in action at the 2025 Australian Open

You’d expect an IT services giant to be striving to make AI utilisation a reality in its own brand and partnership plays, and none are so highly visible to Aussies as Infosys’ partnership with the Australian Open. Virmani cites several experience-led AI examples from the recent 2025 tournament as proof of how Infosys is going beyond “brand slapping” sports sponsorship and using technology demonstration to build a more meaningful brand partnership. It’s worth noting Australia is one of several countries Infosys holds these sorts of partnerships – ATP World Tour is another.

AI firsts this year included agentic AI in the Match Centre, which saw AI producing intelligent, live commentary based on scanning 30 or more parameters at a time, point by point across tennis matches. Approximately 203,000 lines of commentary were generated across mens' and womens' matches At AO 2025 and the feature was viewed 75,000 times during the tournament.

In addition, AI – specifically speech to image conversion technology – was integrated for the first time into an immersive virtual reality tennis game experience allowing the wearer to choose the background of their choice – from a 1970s theme to underwater depths complete with floating turtles. About 13,000 fans donned the VR glasses to participate. Throughout the year, the Beyond Tennis Gen AI league will also allow fans to train up players across eight teams and contribute to their success in an AI-powered online slam.

“We chose not to be merely a platform for brand slapping, which has been how sports sponsorships have been with brands for decades,” Virmani says. “You go and become a partner, put your logo on a side screen and then that becomes a claim to fame for being the partner of a sponsorship platform. For us, it was very clear we will engage in partnership platforms where we don’t just showcase the brand, but we also have an opportunity to really demonstrate what the power of our technology can do to sport. So from a business perspective, it becomes so much more meaningful. Because whatever we are delivering for the sport are possibilities we can deliver for our clients.”

Marketing maturity and that age-old short versus long-term thinking problem

Virmani recognises the maturity of a marketing organisation will play a significant part in whether the function is going to be able to get beyond the short-term opportunities for AI. Fighting against the tide of what has become a relentless focus on efficiency and optimising of marketing in the face of slower economic forces, tougher trading conditions and resulting pressure on costs from boardroom down is no mean feat either.

“If a marketing organisation is driven by more short-term thinking, which is not surprising in an environment where the economy is a challenge, there’s this pressure on costs and marketers have blinkers on and are only focusing on the next quarter and the next year, then you're right, the focus would be on short-term embrace of AI to drive efficiencies and really make the budget go further,” Virmani admits.

“But if you look at the history of brands over decades, we know brands that are stronger brands drive on an average 6 per cent higher growth. The latest Brand Finance released last month demonstrates there’s 6 per cent higher growth for top brands vis a vis the rest of the brand 500. We also know as a matter of fact that stronger brands drive 20 plus per cent shareholder value that’s higher than the industry. That prepares you to grab market share after the downturn, if you are able to invest with the downtown. 

“There's a maturity of the marketing organisation that means you’re able to convince the stakeholder community internally to find the right balance between the short and long term.”

Short-term efficiency using AI is arguably the easiest use case to go after – automating copywriting or automating some creatives and seeing quick benefits coming out of it, agrees Virmani.

“But the real potential of AI is going to come when you are able to democratise experience, where you're going to actually go out there and say, I am going to create a tool set that will help me personalise my campaigns. If there is already an effort by the marketing organisation to say, hey, I am going to balance my investments for the short and long term and both contribute to business results in a very measurable way, then there’s education with research to be done within the organisation,” he says. 

“In the absence of that, you're going to miss out on the bigger picture and the real potential of AI powered transformation, which will only elevate not just the marketing organisation, but will impact the business in the long term.”