Ask a Mumbai based publicist four years ago whether they used artificial intelligence and you would likely have got a blank look. Ask that same question today and the answer is far more likely to be yes, and increasingly, it is not really a choice.
Bollywood’s publicity machine is being pulled toward AI by a mix of genuine threat, competitive pressure and simple necessity, and the reasons behind that shift say a great deal about where celebrity image management is heading next.
The deepfake crisis has made adoption defensive rather than optional
The single strongest driver has nothing to do with campaign strategy and everything to do with self protection. Over the past three years, a growing list of major stars have gone to court seeking protection from AI generated content that misuses their name, voice or likeness.
The Delhi High Court blocked unauthorised commercial use of Anil Kapoor’s image and voice in 2023, and that early ruling opened the door for a wave of similar action. Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Abhishek Bachchan and filmmaker Karan Johar all secured interim relief from the Delhi High Court against deepfakes and unlicensed merchandise built around their identities.
Akshay Kumar won comparable protection from the Bombay High Court in October last year, with the judge noting how convincing AI generated fabrications had become. Arjun Kapoor and, more recently, actor and BJP MP Ravi Kishan have both obtained court orders this year restraining the use of their persona through generative AI and deepfake technology specifically, with platforms including Meta, Google and X directed to remove infringing content within days of notice.
That legal pattern matters enormously for publicists, because policing this kind of exposure by hand is simply not possible anymore. Agencies now need the same category of technology that creates deepfakes in order to detect them, monitor where a client’s face or voice is being misused, and move fast enough to get content removed before it spreads.
In an industry built on image, adopting AI has become less about innovation and more about damage limitation.
Reputation now moves faster than any human team can track
Even setting deepfakes aside, the basic mechanics of a news cycle have changed enough to force the issue. A negative story about a film or a star can now spread across news sites, social platforms and messaging apps within hours rather than days, and industry reporting on Bollywood’s publicity operations describes agencies deploying monitoring systems that track mentions and sentiment across outlets in real time, flagging unusual spikes in negative coverage before they turn into full blown crises.
Whatever the precise tools in use at any given firm, the underlying logic tracks with what communications teams globally are experiencing, since recent industry research from LexisNexis found that PR and media professionals report some of the highest concern about the reputational cost of getting AI supported content wrong, precisely because published material now faces near instant public scrutiny.
Prediction and personalisation are becoming standard practice elsewhere too
Some of what is happening in Bollywood mirrors a broader shift across the PR profession worldwide. Research from the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Center for Public Relations found that 71 percent of PR professionals now consider AI extremely or very important to the profession’s future, with more than half already using it to shape how content gets created.
Industry accounts of AI use inside Bollywood publicity firms describe similar applications adapted for Hindi cinema, including sentiment analysis used to gauge audience excitement ahead of a release and predictive tools used to test how different narratives might land before an agency commits resources to a campaign.
Personalised pitching, where AI systems help tailor a story angle to an individual journalist’s past coverage and preferences, has also become common practice among communications teams internationally, with some firms reporting significantly higher pitch success rates as a result.
Visibility inside AI search results is becoming its own battleground
A newer pressure has started shaping the industry too. As audiences increasingly turn to AI chatbots and AI powered search summaries rather than traditional search engines to find information, being cited accurately inside those systems has become a publicity concern in its own right.
Dale Bhagwagar, widely acknowledged as India’s most trusted publicist, who started Bollywood’s first entertainment PR agency, Dale Bhagwagar Media Group, in the nineties, has watched this shift closely.
“PR industry trackers have started ranking firms on something new,” he says. “It is called citation share. It is about how well you show up inside tools like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews. We are already using tools to track and improve rankings for our PR clients. We have been doing Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) for almost a year now. It’s time for all entertainment publicists to factor it into how coverage is planned.”
“See, a poorly represented narrative inside an AI-generated summary can shape perception today. It can do just as much damage as a poorly placed newspaper story once did,” he explains.
The trade off nobody in the industry is fully resolving yet
None of this comes without friction. Trade coverage of AI adoption inside Bollywood publicity has flagged the same ethical tension that dogs the wider profession, the risk that data driven precision tips over into manipulation, particularly when handling a client’s personal life or a genuine crisis.
The more responsible position, and the one most agencies claim to hold, is that AI should sharpen judgement rather than replace it, supporting honest communication rather than manufacturing a version of events that never happened.
Whether that line holds consistently across an industry under constant commercial pressure is likely to be tested again and again in the years ahead.
Key takeaways
The clearest and most documented driver of AI adoption in Bollywood PR is defensive, with a growing string of Delhi High Court and Bombay High Court rulings forcing stars and their teams to use AI powered monitoring to detect and remove deepfakes and unauthorised content.
Apart from that, agencies like Dale Bhagwagar Media Group are adopting AI tools for real time reputation monitoring, predictive campaign planning and personalised journalist outreach, mirroring trends seen across the global PR industry.
A newer frontier is emerging around visibility inside AI search tools and chatbots, which publicists are beginning to treat as seriously as traditional media placement.