Is AI Running You?
March 30, 2026
Welcome to Edition 01 of The Takumi AI Brief - Every CMO's Weekly Guide!
A 3-minute read covering 3 things: one AI trend that actually matters this week, one AI Shift brands should be watching, and one thing Mohit would do differently if he were in the CMO chair right now.
01 · The Trend That Actually Matters
The rise of AI agents means your marketing team's job description just changed.
Everyone is talking about AI agents right now and for good reason. OpenAI, Google and Microsoft have all made major moves in the last 90 days to put autonomous AI agents at the centre of how businesses operate. These are not chatbots you prompt and wait on. These are systems that plan, execute and optimise entire workflows on their own.
For a CMO in retail, BFSI or e-commerce, this is not an abstract tech story. It is a direct challenge to how your marketing team is structured today. The brands moving fastest are already running AI agents across campaign management, customer journey optimisation and content production, with leaner teams and significantly shorter execution cycles.
The problem is that most marketing organisations are trying to plug agents into an operation that was never designed for them. The approval chains, the team structures, the data systems, none of it was built with autonomous AI in mind and that mismatch is exactly why the results do not show up in the numbers.
02 · The AI Shift to Watch
ChatGPT now has ads and your brand is already in the conversation whether you planned for it or not.
60% of searches today are zero-click, which means your customers in retail, BFSI and e-commerce are going straight to ChatGPT and other LLMs for answers instead of scrolling through search results. Your brand is being represented inside those conversations right now, with or without your input.
OpenAI just opened paid placements at $60 CPM and a $200k minimum entry point, which means brands are about to spend serious budget on visibility they have not actually earned yet. The problem is that paid ads in ChatGPT sit on top of organic presence. If your brand is not already showing up naturally in LLM answers, no amount of ad spend is going to fix that foundation.
This is exactly why GEO, which stands for Generative Engine Optimisation, is the fastest growing brief we are getting from CMOs at Takumi right now. It is about making sure LLMs cite your brand correctly, in the right context, before your competitors get there first.
03 · If I Were in the CMO Chair
I would stop celebrating AI adoption and start demanding AI outcomes.
The conversation I keep having with CMOs goes something like this. We have AI running across the team, the tools are in place, people are using them every day. But when I ask what has actually changed in the business, the room goes quiet. That silence is telling.
Here is the hard truth. Most organisations are measuring the wrong things. Tools purchased, content pieces generated, hours saved. None of that answers the one question the board is asking, which is what is AI actually doing for the business?
The CMOs getting this right are not tracking adoption rates. They picked one metric tied to revenue, whether that is campaign turnaround time, cost per acquisition or conversion on personalised journeys, and rebuilt that workflow around AI. The before and after becomes the business case that no slide deck can replicate.
At Takumi, this is exactly how we work with clients across BFSI, retail and e-commerce. Start narrow, prove it works, then scale it. That is how AI goes from a pilot to a competitive advantage.
Until next week, keep building, keep questioning.
— Mohit Lodha, Founder, Takumi AI