Bengaluru: Bata India’s decision to move almost its entire creative production operation to an AI-powered system has already triggered a larger conversation in the advertising industry: if artificial intelligence can brief, create, adapt, review and publish brand communication at a fraction of the traditional cost, what exactly remains for the advertising agency to do?

For veteran advertising professional Prathap Suthan, that question is uncomfortable—but necessary.

Bata recently revealed that 100% of its creatives are now being created without a creative or social media agency. Working with AI marketing technology company Zocket, the footwear major has rebuilt its creative workflow around AI agents, models, brand guidelines and feedback loops, with its in-house marketing team overseeing the process.

The economics are equally compelling. Bata says the model has helped reduce its overall creative costs by almost 80%, translating into annual savings of close to Rs 1 crore. Traditional production requirements such as locations, film crews and large-scale shoots have been significantly reduced, while even celebrity and influencer content is being produced through what Bata describes as “digital AI shoots”.

Bata’s chief strategy officer and chief business development officer Badri Beriwal has also made it clear that the ambition was never to make advertising that visibly looked like AI. The objective was to create work that looked like Bata.

And that, perhaps, is precisely where Suthan’s argument begins.

‘Bata just gave us the boot’

Reacting to the development in an advertising community forum, Suthan opened with a deliberately provocative line: “Bata just gave us the boot. In the butt. Literally.”

Behind the humour, however, lies a much more serious observation about where the advertising business is headed.

Suthan does not dismiss Bata’s decision outright. In fact, he suggests that Bata may be one of the brands best positioned to make such an experiment.

His reasoning is rooted in the nature of Bata’s brand equity.

Bata has existed for generations. Its red logo carries enormous accumulated memory. For millions of Indians, the brand is associated with everyday footwear—school shoes, formal shoes, sandals and practical footwear. Its strength has historically been familiarity, availability and dependability rather than an urgent need to generate cultural excitement every day.

And that distinction is important.

Suthan’s provocative proposition is that perhaps a significant portion of the advertising Bata needs on a daily basis is fundamentally production-led rather than idea-led.

A product. A foot. A model. A suitable background. A festival adaptation. A monsoon execution. A school reopening execution. A new product visual.

AI can generate thousands of such variations before a conventional agency has moved through its briefing, conceptualisation, presentation and feedback cycles.

The uncomfortable part for agencies is not that AI can produce advertising.

It is that AI may expose how much advertising was never particularly difficult to produce in the first place.

The real threat is not AI-generated creativity

For Suthan, the bigger threat to agencies is therefore not the machine becoming the next David Ogilvy.

It is the machine becoming good enough at the enormous volume of advertising that was never Ogilvy-like to begin with.

Photography, films, animation, copy, adaptations and multiple formats are becoming increasingly easy to generate. AI can deliver speed, scale and variation in ways that conventional agency structures struggle to match.

And if the human marketing team is already capable of briefing the system, evaluating its output, rejecting poor work and approving what goes live, the traditional agency production model becomes increasingly difficult to justify.

But Suthan makes an important distinction.

The problem is not that AI is going to eliminate creativity.

The problem is that the advertising industry may have spent too much time confusing production with creativity.

There is already plenty of mediocre advertising produced entirely by humans, he points out in effect. Correct product. Correct logo. Correct font. Correct brand colours. A smiling model. Everyone approves it and moves on.

AI did not create that mediocrity.

Humans did.

AI may simply make it possible to produce that mediocrity much faster.

That is a far more uncomfortable challenge for agencies than the familiar debate about whether machines can truly be creative.

So, what exactly is the agency’s value?

This is where Suthan’s argument moves beyond Bata.

If production is becoming increasingly automated, what remains as the defensible value of an advertising agency?

His answer is judgement.

The ability to tell a client that the brief itself is wrong.

The ability to recognise something happening in culture before it appears on a dashboard.

The ability to identify an overlooked behavioural or cultural insight.

The ability to make an unexpected connection.

And, perhaps most importantly, the ability to see what a brand could become, rather than simply reproducing what it already is.

That distinction could become the defining fault line between agencies that remain relevant and those that become increasingly commoditised.

If an agency's proposition is simply “we can make your content”, AI will increasingly challenge that proposition.

If the proposition is “we understand your brand, your consumer, culture and the future space your brand can occupy—and we can make you see something you could not see yourself”, the equation is very different.

In that sense, Bata's move is less a story about AI replacing advertising agencies and more a test of whether agencies have successfully moved beyond being advertising production companies.

Bata may be able to run on its inheritance. But for how long?

Suthan’s criticism, however, does not stop at the agency.

He raises an equally important question for Bata itself.

Large, established brands possess something that AI cannot manufacture overnight: accumulated brand equity.

Bata can experiment with AI today because generations of consumers have already built the meaning of the brand.

The machine has arrived after the house was built.

It has effectively been handed the keys and asked to keep the lights on.

And AI will probably do that very efficiently.

It can create an endless stream of perfectly acceptable footwear content.

But Suthan's concern is that brands can become trapped in what might be called “infinite adequacy”—an endless supply of communication that is correct, consistent, efficient and acceptable, but rarely culturally meaningful.

That is where the debate becomes more consequential.

Because brand equity is not necessarily destroyed through one bad campaign. It can be slowly spent through years of being predictable, safe and increasingly irrelevant.

A brand can remain famous while becoming less desirable.

It can remain familiar without remaining culturally interesting.

It can continue to be bought without being actively wanted.

For a brand with Bata’s enormous legacy, that distinction matters.

‘Bata just gave us the boot’

The real threat is not AI-generated creativity

So, what exactly is the agency’s value?

Bata may be able to run on its inheritance. But for how long?

What happens when the brand stops creating desire?

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