Not too long ago, if you wanted to launch a D2C fashion label in India, you hired a village: graphic designers, models, and copywriters to build the foundation. Today, the village has been replaced by a prompt.
With India’s D2C market projected to reach $60 billion by 2027 (CII & RBSA Advisors), the barriers to entry have all but disappeared. But when the entire industry relies on the same AI tools at the same time, creative output inevitably drifts toward the average.
Execution is no longer a differentiator. Perspective is.
What is AI?
To understand why perspective matters, we must understand what AI actually is. Large Language Models (LLMs) and image generators are prediction machines. They are trained on the entirety of the internet, the sum total of human output up to this moment.
What it gives you is Khichdi. It takes the rice, lentils, and spices of history, blends them together, and serves up a dish. It is a mush of everything that has worked before.
This is risky for Indian brands known for their vibrant storytelling. Ask Midjourney to generate an “Indian wedding,” and it will produce Bollywood tropes: red lehengas, marigolds, an elephant if you’re unlucky. The nuance gets lost.
When every brand uses the same tools to mix the same ingredients, the market becomes a sea of sameness. For Indian brands, specifically those fighting for the attention of the aspirational class, your only differentiation is your taste.
We are entering an era of infinite content and finite attention. As the cost of creating content drops to zero, the cost of acquiring attention has spiked. Industry estimates suggest that Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) have risen by approximately 60% over the last five years.
Should the Creative Class Be Replaced?
There is a prevailing fear that AI will replace the Creative Director or the Copywriter. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the job.
If your role was simply to move pixels or generate text, yes, you are in danger. But if your job is to sell a feeling, a belief, or a distinct worldview, you have never been more essential.
Consider the arrival of Canva. Graphic designers feared extinction, but the tool simply democratized basic execution. It freed high-level designers to focus on complex identity systems and brand strategy. AI offers the same shift. It is an efficiency engine that can write fifty headlines in thirty seconds. However, it takes a human creative to decide which headline works and why.
This is where your perspective matters.
It is the ability to look at a perfect AI-generated image and reject it because it feels soulless. It is the instinct to know that a specific shade of Rani Pink must be used as that carries a political context in rural India. It is the copywriter who deletes AI’s grammatically perfect caption and replaces it with distinct "Hinglish" that signals to the reader: I know who you are.
Be in the Business of Taste
Every strong brand is a fiction, a constructed universe, and people buy the story of the world they want to belong to.
And as AI becomes the default engine behind content creation, taste becomes the only true advantage left. And to have taste, is to have as obsession: with people, with subcultures, with politics, with texture, with language, with moods.
As we move toward 2026, whether you use AI or not, the only question that matters is: the world you are creating, the story you are telling, and how meaningfully your customers can participate in it.