Discussions about AI in business are often dominated by hype and vague promises of transformation. We hear about grand, futuristic strategies, but the conversation rarely touches on what's happening on the ground, inside the day-to-day operations of real companies.

Headlines scream about trillion-dollar investments and chatbots that can pass the toughest exam, while a recent MIT study found that 95% of enterprise AI pilots are delivering zero ROI.

This disconnect obscures the most important trend: the most innovative brands aren't chasing flashy gimmicks. They are systematically and quietly rebuilding their core operational workflows with AI.

Walk into the offices of India's fastest-growing D2C brands, and you'll see small teams shipping 3-5x more experiments per week, creative ops roles that didn't exist two years ago, and dashboards tracking "% of workflows using AI" alongside traditional KPIs.

This is the practical reality for leading D2C brands in fashion, beauty, lifestyle, and FMCG categories. They are using AI not just to automate tasks, but to create entirely new feedback loops, accelerate workflows, and empower non-technical teams in ways that were previously impossible.

In a hyper-competitive landscape where customer acquisition costs are rising sharply year-on-year and consumers expect always-on shopping experiences, AI is table stakes.

Winning brands are systematically identifying high-friction workflows, applying AI to collapse operational complexity, and measuring impact with the same rigor they apply to their growth metrics.

Through dozens of conversations with brand operators, a clear taxonomy of adoption has emerged.

In this report, we’ve mapped ten practical ways that D2C brands in India are actually deploying AI to fundamentally restructure operations and creative processes, and why it matters.

AI isn't solving new problems. It's solving old problems (creative production, catalog management, training, etc.) faster, cheaper, and at greater scale than was previously possible. The brands that recognize this and systematically rebuild their operations with AI at the core will dominate the next decade.

The question isn't "Will AI transform D2C?"

The question is "Are you building capabilities fast enough to keep up?"