Earlier this month, we wrapped up Forrester’s India Predictions 2025 event. I look forward to this event every year, and this year was no exception. This year’s event for India saw record turnout, with over 350 participants across three cities in India including marketing and tech leaders. The conversations were insightful and engaging, setting the stage for discussing the predictions we had lined up.
Here is a summary of the key marketing predictions for India for 2025.
Prediction 1: CMOs and CSOs will aim to reorganize in 2025, but half will fail to fix what ails them.
We predict that CMOs and CSOs will aim to reorganize their processes and teams, but half of these efforts will fail to address underlying issues.
Forrester’s Q4 2023 Demand Marketing Organizational Design And Process Survey uncovered that many organizations are embarking on transformation projects, change management, and AI-driven disruptions to drive growth. Despite these efforts, only 12% of marketing leaders believe that their current organizational design will help them meet revenue targets over the next year. This lack of confidence will drive more reorganization efforts in 2025. Organizations may attempt to address competency gaps by quick moves such as moving partner ecosystem marketing under the CMO, swapping revenue development reps between sales and marketing, or rebranding revenue operations under a “go-to-market” title, but superficial changes won’t suffice. Instead, the focus should be on resetting strategy and planning around customers, developing shared KPIs for marketing and sales teams, fixing broken revenue processes, improving operational effectiveness, building stakeholder trust, and enhancing talent to blend human and machine competencies.
Prediction 2: Generative AI will drive B2B buyers to consider more vendors in the purchase cycle.
We predict that generative AI (genAI) will drive 50% of B2B buyers to consider five or more providers for large purchases but will still shrink buying cycles.
GenAI has been adopted faster than any technology in history, significantly changing B2B buying behavior. Forrester’s Buyers’ Journey Survey, 2024, revealed that B2B buyers are now spoiled for choice, with genAI aiding in more thorough research during the sourcing and provider evaluation process.
A survey of nearly 600 Asia Pacific purchase influencers involved in B2B purchases of USD$1 million found that 91% of business buyers using or planning to use genAI reported achieving better business outcomes. Additionally, 65% of buyers considered more than one provider, with one-third considering five or more vendors.
GenAI is also compressing the buying cycle, with 65% of buyers who are using genAI to inform their purchases reporting quicker decision-making. Marketers must respond to this compressed sales cycle by reaching buyers before they enter an active sales cycle, focusing on their core target audience, and optimizing their generative presence.
Prediction 3: AI coworkers in marketing will become commonplace.
We predict that AI coworkers will emerge as valued team members in two out of five organizations but won’t affect marketing departments’ headcount in 2025.
AI may eventually reduce the human marketing function, but this won’t happen in 2025. While AI-powered assistants are becoming smarter, marketers still don’t fully trust them (29% of genAI decision-makers say that lack of trust in AI is a significant barrier to adoption).
Investment in B2B conversation automation solutions continues to grow, with 55% of global B2B marketing leaders planning to increase spending on this technology. This will expand further in 2025 to support use cases requiring real-time contextual insights and output to fuel marketing and sales processes. As AI-powered chatbots and assistants evolve from experiments to essential components of the B2B martech stack, they will become trusted coworkers working alongside humans, supporting a wide range of use cases across the growth engine, engaging prospects and customers in conversations across channels, and automating back-end tasks with greater autonomy.
It is crucial for organizations to get started with agentic AI solutions to drive greater efficiency and effectiveness in process workflows.
If you would like to discuss how your company can benefit from these predictions and build a more effective marketing organization, feel free to reach out by contacting us.
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