Reflections

By Vishal | October 2026 The question a marketer keeps asking I am not saying there is no AI market. The technology has proven itself, and the models are good. My question is different, and as a marketer it is my first, second, third, fourth and fifth question: show me the market. Who pays, from which budget, how much, and what do they stop paying for in return? This piece works through that question with numbers. The figures are rough, the assumptions are stated, and where I could not verify something I say so.       1. The debt behind the boom The scale is in trillions, not hundreds of trillions, and that is still enormous. •          About $1.35 trillion of debt sits on the balance sheets of five hyperscalers (Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Oracle), plus roughly $1.65 trillion of off-balance-sheet AI obligations such as long-term data centre, compute and power contracts (Nikkei Asia analysis, as reported by YourS...

In the modern business landscape, brands need to pay far more attention to their customers. A single review in today’s interconnected world can completely destroy sales, or a single missing detail can cause missed sales. How brands communicate, how they structure their packaging details, and how they handle consumer mentions on social media reflect the state of the modern marketing scenario—and right now, critical fundamentals are being missed. A Lesson in Consumer Behavior: Financial Incentives vs. Trust My experience began when I was looking for Pooja ghee. I was evaluating a new brand simply because it was available on a particular platform where I had some credit available. Having free cash or credit on a platform makes a purchase financially more remunerative, but that doesn't mean a consumer is going to compromise on product quality. That is a crucial consumer behavior lesson. Because this was not my regular brand, I decided to look up the product in detail before committ...

  The Fallacy of Tech-Led Returns Take a look at the current landscape of Technology and AI adoption. Everyone bought invtested into Technology, and then later on into AI tools. They ran pilots, automated functions, introduced AI when the AI boom came, built agents, and scaled them. Yet the vast majority are left wondering at empty balance sheets, wondering where the promised returns went. The reason for this failure isn't technical. It is a fundamental misunderstanding of corporate finance and organizational architecture. The truth is simple: ROI is not and will never be a technology function. It is a business function.       Why ROI Belongs to Business Leadership First of all, revenue KPIs in the managerial performance sheet only start from Senior Manager or AVP on up, where revenue and cost parameters actually appear. There is a reason for this – achieving ROI needs a business perspective, an eye for cross functional detailing, an ability to execute across...