India, June 29 -- John Wanamaker, one of the biggest retailers of the 1900s, once said, "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is, I don't know which half." And marketers held this as an absolute for a hundred years.

But the truth is, it wasn't just a marketing problem.

The operations head didn't know what was slowing deliveries down. The product team didn't know which feature users actually wanted. The finance team was forecasting expenses without comprehending the data. And more often than not, gut feelings ran businesses.

In 2026, AI is closer to fixing that than anyone ever was. By making sense of granular data, AI is now helping companies find customers faster, enable quicker deliveries, and make business de...