The Agencies Selling AI Are Mostly Selling Hype. These Three Founders Are Doing Something Different.

Walk into most digital marketing agency pitches in India today and you will hear the same thing. Artificial intelligence. Automation. Smarter targeting. Better results. The slide decks have changed. The language has changed. What has not changed, in many cases, is the outcome — founders still burning through ad budgets with little to show for it, still switching agencies every eight months, still wondering why the ROAS their agency promised on slide four never materialised in their bank account.

Akshay Jain has heard this story more times than he can count.

"The problem was never production speed," says Jain, 27, Chief Creative Officer and co-founder of BloomX Business Solutions, a performance marketing agency founded in 2020 that now manages over ₹100 crore in annual ad spend across 500-plus campaigns. "The agencies that rushed to say 'we use AI' without asking 'to do what, exactly' — they are now producing faster versions of the same mediocre work."

It is a blunt assessment of an industry that has, in Akshay Jain's view, consistently confused activity with accountability. And it raises a question worth asking: in a country with 900 million internet users and a D2C market that crossed ₹50,000 crore in 2025, are Indian brands actually getting smarter about how they spend on marketing — or are they just buying the same mistakes at higher speed?

Three Friends, One Bet, Five Years

BloomX was not built around a technology thesis. It was built around frustration.

Akshay Jain, along with co-founders Anuj Patni and Karan Batra, met at a Pune startup where all three were handling marketing together. What they saw — in that company and in the broader ecosystem around them — was an industry organised around billings rather than results.

Agencies were paid to run campaigns. Whether those campaigns worked was, in practice, a secondary concern.

"We weren't trying to build the biggest agency," says Karan Batra, who serves as Chief Business Officer and handles client relationships. “We were trying to build one that actually worked — where a client could trace a rupee of ad spend to a rupee of revenue.”

That orientation — tracing spend to revenue rather than spend to impressions — is what Anuj Patni, the agency's Chief Growth Officer and media buying lead, describes as the only metric that matters. "ROAS without revenue is a vanity metric," says Patni. "I've seen campaigns that look beautiful on a dashboard and are quietly destroying a brand's unit economics."

The three started with whatever clients they could find, handled creative, media buying, and strategy themselves, and grew without external funding. Today BloomX employs close to 90 people across Mumbai and Central India, and claims to have generated over ₹212 crore in revenue for its clients — a 2.12x return on the ad spend it has managed.

What AI Actually Changed

When generative AI tools went mainstream in late 2022, BloomX did what most agencies claimed to do but fewer actually did: tested the tools on live client work.

The results were specific. On creative production — writing headline variations, drafting landing page copy, resizing assets across formats — AI cut the team's production time by close to 60 percent. Tasks that once took two days began taking a few hours.

Anuj Patni uses AI for audience analysis and a problem he describes as creative fatigue detection

— identifying when an ad set is beginning to underperform before the performance data fully confirms it. "In a campaign where a wrong call can burn ten lakh in a week, an early warning signal is worth a lot," Patni says.

The clearest example of AI producing a measurable outcome, Akshay Jain says, came from a business coaching client running ₹3 lakh a month on Meta ads. Leads were coming in at ₹800 each — acceptable on paper. But the webinar those leads were being sent to had a 12 percent show-up rate. Most of the spend was effectively being wasted.

AI-assisted funnel analysis identified the problem in hours rather than days: the ad was making a different promise than the registration page was delivering. The messaging was misaligned. After rewriting the registration sequence, show-up rates climbed to 34 percent within three weeks. The cost per attending lead dropped by 57 percent. The ad budget did not change. The offer did not change. The messaging did.

"AI found the gap faster than a manual audit would have," Akshay Jain says. “But a human had to understand why the gap existed and what to put in its place.”

The Accountability Gap Nobody Wants to Talk About

The BloomX founders are not anti-AI. They are, if anything, more embedded in AI tooling than most agencies of their size. What they are against is the way AI is being used as a sales pitch to obscure a structural problem in how Indian marketing agencies operate.

"Performance marketing in India has a fundamental accountability problem," Akshay Jain says. "Agencies are paid for activity. Campaigns launched. Creatives made. Reports sent. They are rarely held accountable for revenue generated, or cost per acquisition against a real business target."

AI, in this framing, does not fix the accountability gap. It can widen it — because an agency using AI to produce more output faster can generate more activity, more decks, more data, and still deliver no actual return.

Karan Batra, who speaks to founders at the point of deciding whether to hire BloomX, says the single most revealing question a founder can ask any agency is not whether they use AI. It is: what does a human decide, and what does the algorithm decide?

"If they can't answer that specifically," Batra says, “then AI is probably being used to produce faster output, not better outcomes.”

What the Market Is Starting to Understand

India's D2C ecosystem is in a different place than it was three years ago. The founders who were spending on ads in 2021 and 2022 — when the market was expanding and performance benchmarks were softer — are now operating in tighter conditions. Acquisition costs have risen. Consumer attention is harder to hold. The tolerance for agencies that deliver dashboards without results has dropped.

"Founders are getting sharper," Akshay Jain says. "They've been burned enough times to know the difference between an agency that understands their business and an agency that understands how to talk about understanding their business."

That shift, the BloomX founders argue, is ultimately what AI cannot accelerate. Experience — specifically, the experience of having been wrong enough times to recognise what wrong looks like before it becomes expensive — is not a dataset. It does not compress.

"The agencies that survive the next five years," Akshay Jain says, “are not the ones that adopted AI the earliest. They are the ones that understood their craft well enough to know exactly where AI belongs — and where it does not.”

Akshay Jain is the Chief Creative Officer and Co-Founder of BloomX Business Solutions. Anuj Patni is Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer. Karan Batra is Co-Founder and Chief Business Officer. BloomX Business Solutions is a Mumbai-based performance marketing agency that has managed ₹100 crore+ in ad spend and generated ₹212 crore+ in client revenue across 500+ campaigns for Indian D2C brands, EdTech companies, coaching businesses, and wellness brands.