Polycab
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KPIMore first meetings turn into real deals, on less preparation time
He asked for more details about our company as they are currently exploring AI workflows to adopt in their org for the marketing team particularly. Interested to explore tools around content creation related to custo mised adds
Amit joined Polycab in August 2024 with a mandate to professionalise B2C brand and marcom across a broadening FMEG portfolio — and within roughly 18 months he is proactively seeking AI tools for his team, specifically for content creation and customised ad production. That timing signals he has now mapped the problem clearly enough to evaluate solutions: the workflow infrastructure hasn't kept pace with the category expansion, and he's ready to move.
AI Workflow Automation
AI Workflow Automation high
Accelerating Polycab's B2C brand equity across its FMEG portfolio (Lighting, Switches, Appliances) to reduce the perception gap with rivals like Havells and Orient — a core challenge for a brand historically known for wires, not lifestyle products
Amit Sethiya
Category Head – Brand & Marketing Communications (B2C), Polycab India Limited · ~2 years (joined Aug 2024 per LinkedIn; prior roles at Syska LED as Head of Marketing and earlier at Tata and Jindal)
Amit is a seasoned B2C marketing leader with 20+ years spanning consumer electronics (Syska LED, where he built the brand into a nationally recognised name), steel (Jindal), real estate, and now Fast-Moving Electrical Goods (FMEG) at Polycab. He holds an MMS in Marketing from NL Dalmia Institute, Mumbai. He is a LinkedIn creator with nearly 20,000 followers, a former Akashwani FM Radio Jockey, and a regular guest faculty at top B-Schools — signalling someone who is vocal about marketing craft, brand storytelling, and emerging media. He has been recognised as a Top 50 Most Influential Marketing Professional (AFAQ, 2018), Top 100 Powerful Influencer in Advertising & Marketing (Adgully, 2018–2019), Super 30 CMO (IAMAI, 2019), and Most Influential Marketing Leader (World Marketing Congress, 2022). His mandate at Polycab covers brand and marcom for a wide B2C portfolio: Wires & Cables, Lighting, Switches, Switchgears, and Appliances.
- Accelerating Polycab's B2C brand equity across its FMEG portfolio (Lighting, Switches, Appliances) to reduce the perception gap with rivals like Havells and Orient — a core challenge for a brand historically known for wires, not lifestyle products
- Scaling personalised and customised advertising content across diverse Indian geographies and demographics without proportionally scaling the marketing team's headcount or agency spend
- Building a digitally-led integrated marketing communications (IMC) engine — given his stated expertise in Digital & Social Media Strategy and his own active digital presence with ~19,600 LinkedIn followers
- Exploring and adopting AI-driven marketing workflows to increase content velocity and creative throughput — the explicit context of this meeting request regarding 'AI workflows for content creation related to customised ads'
- Establishing measurable ROI metrics and campaign performance visibility for leadership, given Polycab's publicly stated ambition to grow FMEG revenue as a share of overall revenue
- Integrated Marketing Communications and brand-building at scale across categories
- Digital and social media strategy — active LinkedIn creator with nearly 20,000 followers and a personal website (amitsethiya.com)
- Teaching and mentoring — regularly lectures at top Indian B-Schools and is passionate about developing marketing talent
- Music and performance — 8-year career as an RJ at Akashwani FM Mumbai, which informs his storytelling and content sensibility
- Marketing technology and innovation — proactively reached out to NSOffice AI about AI workflow tools for his team, indicating a forward-leaning stance on martech adoption
Polycab today
- Industry
- Fast-Moving Electrical Goods (FMEG) & Wires/Cables Manufacturing
- Size
- ~7,000–8,000+ permanent employees; 25+ manufacturing plants; listed company (BSE: 542652, NSE: POLYCAB)
- HQ
- Mumbai, Maharashtra, India (Registered office: Lower Parel, Mumbai)
- Footprint
- Manufacturing: 25+ plants primarily in Halol (Gujarat), Daman, Nashik, and Roorkee — giving Polycab one of the largest cable manufacturing capacities in Asia · Pan-India distribution: 4,000+ dealers, 200,000+ retail touchpoints across Tier 1 through Tier 4 cities · International: Exports to 70+ countries; international business unit with a growing Middle East and Africa footprint · B2C brand presence: Active across digital, TV, OOH, and retail in-store with campaigns spanning regional languages · Key customer segments: Real estate developers, infrastructure contractors (B2B/project), electricians and retail consumers (B2C), and institutional buyers
Polycab India Limited is India's largest manufacturer of wires and cables by revenue, and a fast-growing player in the Fast-Moving Electrical Goods (FMEG) segment. Listed on NSE and BSE, the company sells a broad B2C portfolio — Wires & Cables, Lighting, Switches & Switchgear, Fans, and Appliances — under the Polycab brand. It distributes through a network of 4,000+ authorised dealers and 200,000+ retail touchpoints across India, and exports to 70+ countries. For FY2024, Polycab reported consolidated revenues of approximately ₹18,827 crore (~USD 2.3 billion) with a net profit of ~₹1,622 crore, reflecting strong growth driven by infrastructure spending and housing demand. The FMEG segment remains a strategic priority but contributes a smaller share of revenue compared to the core Wires & Cables business, making brand differentiation and category marketing central to Polycab's growth thesis.
- FY2024 revenue hit ~₹18,827 crore with net profit of ~₹1,622 crore, marking continued double-digit growth — management has communicated ambitious targets to grow FMEG category revenue as a proportion of the mix
- Polycab launched new product lines across Switches, Fans, and Appliances in FY2024–25, broadening the B2C portfolio and increasing the complexity of category-specific marketing campaigns Amit's team must support
- The company has been investing in expanding its retail and channel partner network, requiring customised trade marketing and localised content at scale across diverse regional markets
- Polycab's leadership has publicly flagged increasing competitive intensity from Havells, Bajaj Electricals, and Anchor (Panasonic) in the FMEG space — a pressure that directly raises the stakes on brand differentiation and marketing effectiveness
- Active digital and social media brand-building: Polycab runs high-visibility campaigns (IPL-season advertising, influencer tie-ups) reflecting a deliberate push to shift brand perception from a 'wire company' to a full FMEG lifestyle brand
- Amit Sethiya joined as Category Brand & Marcom Head in August 2024, signalling a leadership investment in professionalising the B2C marketing function — and he has proactively initiated this AI workflow exploration meeting within his first two years
- Scale of customised content creation: Polycab's FMEG portfolio spans 6+ product categories sold through 200,000+ retail touchpoints across diverse regional markets — producing localised, SKU-level, and channel-specific ad creatives manually is a significant operational bottleneck for a lean marketing team
- Brand perception gap vs. competitors: Havells and Bajaj Electricals have stronger FMEG consumer brand recognition; Polycab's marketing team is under pressure to produce more content, more campaigns, and more targeted messaging without a commensurate increase in agency budgets
- Content velocity vs. campaign complexity: Running integrated campaigns across TV, digital, OOH, and in-store simultaneously across regional geographies requires rapid content localisation — a workflow pain that Amit himself flagged by requesting AI tools around 'customised ads'
- Marketing team bandwidth: A single Category Brand & Marcom Head overseeing Wires, Cables, Lighting, Switches, Switchgear, and Appliances implies significant creative and operational coordination load on a team that may not be large enough to run campaigns across all categories at the same speed
- Measurement and reporting gaps: Polycab's FMEG business is at a growth stage where marketing ROI accountability is rising — without a centralised dashboard tracking campaign throughput, approvals, and creative asset status, leadership visibility into marketing operations is limited
- Approval and workflow coordination overhead: Campaigns spanning multiple categories, geographies, and media formats require multi-stakeholder sign-offs (brand, legal, category managers, agency partners) — manual coordination via email and messaging tools creates delays, version confusion, and missed deadlines
- FMEG category expansion: Polycab has publicly committed to growing FMEG revenue as a share of the overall business, targeting brand recognition parity with Havells in Switches, Lighting, and Fans — requiring sustained, high-volume brand and category marketing
- Digital-first brand building: Polycab is increasing investment in digital and social media marketing, with Amit's hire specifically reflecting the intent to build more sophisticated, integrated B2C marcom capabilities
- Hyperlocal and regional marketing at scale: Given a 200,000+ retailer network spanning Tier 1–4 towns, Polycab is betting on localised content and regional language campaigns to drive retail offtake — a strategy that inherently demands high-volume customised content production
- Channel partner and trade marketing programs: Polycab regularly runs loyalty, engagement, and co-branding programs with its 4,000+ dealer network — each requiring tailored collateral and communications
- Product innovation and launch velocity: New product introductions across Fans, Appliances, and Smart Switches in FY2024–25 are increasing the frequency of go-to-market campaigns, each needing creative assets, product explainers, and launch communications
- Data-driven marketing and personalisation: Amit's background in Consumer Insights & Market Segmentation and his proactive outreach about AI workflow tools signals an intent to shift the marketing function toward more analytics-driven, personalised communications
Positioning
Polycab's B2C marketing team is running a complex, multi-category campaign operation — six product lines, 200,000+ retail touchpoints, and diverse regional markets — with the same content production and approval workflows that a single-category brand might use. NSOffice AI's AI Workflow Automation platform lets Amit's team build and deploy multi-step marketing workflows — creative briefing, agency routing, localised asset approval, and distribution — without writing a line of code, compressing what today takes days of email chains into hours of automated, trackable process. Pair that with our Intelligent Document Processing to automatically route agency POs, vendor contracts, and campaign reports, and you get a marketing operations engine that can match the velocity Polycab's FMEG ambitions demand.
Pitches
AI Workflow Automation
Amit's team is tasked with producing customised ad content at scale across six FMEG categories and regional Indian markets — a workflow that today likely runs through a tangle of email briefs, WhatsApp approvals, and agency back-and-forth. NSOffice AI's no-code Workflow Automation builder lets your marketing team design a repeatable, automated pipeline: brief intake → AI-assisted copy and asset variant generation → brand compliance check → stakeholder approval routing → channel-ready output — all without IT involvement. The result is a marketing team that can produce regional campaign variants in hours rather than days, with a full audit trail that makes agency coordination and leadership reporting significantly cleaner.
Intelligent Document Processing
Every campaign Polycab runs generates a paper trail: agency SOWs, vendor POs, creative approval forms, media insertion orders, and post-campaign reports. Today, these likely arrive in different formats, land in different inboxes, and require manual sorting and routing before anyone can act on them. NSOffice AI's Intelligent Document Processing automatically ingests, classifies, extracts key data from, and routes these documents to the right person or workflow — so your team spends zero time on document triage and 100% of their attention on the campaign work that actually moves the needle.
NSOffice AI Analytics Dashboard
As Category Brand & Marcom Head, Amit is accountable for demonstrating marketing ROI across six product lines to Polycab's leadership — but if the underlying workflow data (how many assets produced, average approval cycle time, campaign throughput by category) isn't being tracked centrally, that reporting is an educated guess. NSOffice AI's Analytics Dashboard surfaces real-time KPIs on workflow throughput, document processing volumes, and administrative bottlenecks — giving Amit the operational intelligence to identify where his team's time is going, report confidently to the CMO or CEO, and build a continuous improvement case for the marketing function.
Conversation arc
“Amit, thanks for making time. I read about your background building Syska LED into a nationally recognised brand and now leading marcom across Polycab's full B2C portfolio — Wires, Lighting, Switches, Appliances, all of it. That's a lot of categories to run campaigns across simultaneously. I wanted to start by making sure I understand the specific workflow challenge you're trying to solve around customised ad content — because that context will shape everything I show you today.”
“When you think about producing a customised ad — say, a localised version of a Switches campaign for a dealer in Tamil Nadu versus one in Rajasthan — how does that process work today? Who initiates the brief, who approves the creative, and how long does it typically take from brief to live asset? And roughly how many of those variants is your team producing across categories in a given quarter?”
“Let me show you what this looks like for a team in your position. Imagine you brief a new Fans campaign for the summer season. With NSOffice AI, your team builds a workflow once — brief intake, automatic routing to your creative resource or agency partner, AI-assisted generation of regional copy variants, brand compliance check, approval sign-off, and export to your media channels. No email chains, no version confusion. What takes your team three days of coordination today runs in a few hours with a full audit trail.”
“I hear this — you need brand-safe, on-strategy content, not generic AI output. What I'd say is: our platform doesn't replace your creative judgment or your agency's executional craft. It automates the workflow around content — the briefing, routing, approval, versioning, and distribution steps that consume your team's time without adding creative value. Your brand guidelines live in the system, and every output routes through your defined approval gates before anything goes live. Polycab's voice stays Polycab's voice.”
“Here's what I'd suggest as a practical first step: let's pick one category — maybe Switches or Fans, where you're running regional variants already — and run a 30-day pilot on just the content briefing-to-approval workflow. We'll baseline how long that process takes today, run it through the NSOffice AI workflow builder, and measure the delta. If we cut your campaign turnaround time by 40% on that one workflow, you'll have a clear, quantified business case to scale across the rest of the portfolio. Can we agree on that scope and set a kick-off date?”
Ask these
- Q1How many unique ad creative variants is your team producing per quarter across Polycab's FMEG portfolio today — and of those, how many require regional language or market-specific customisation? I ask because your go-to-market spans a 200,000-retailer network across linguistically and culturally diverse markets, and the content volume implied by that footprint is often where teams hit a ceiling with manual production processes.
- Q2Walk me through how a campaign brief moves from Amit's desk to a live, localised ad asset today — specifically, how many handoffs happen, which of those are manual (email, WhatsApp, shared drives), and where does the process most commonly stall or require rework? Understanding the current workflow topology will help us identify which specific steps NSOffice AI can compress or eliminate first.
- Q3With six B2C product categories under your mandate — Wires, Cables, Lighting, Switches, Switchgear, and Appliances — how does your team currently manage campaign prioritisation and resource allocation when two or more categories need creative output simultaneously? The reason I ask is that teams in this situation often have invisible bottlenecks around approval bandwidth rather than creative capacity itself.
- Q4When you mention 'customised ads' in the context of this AI exploration — are you primarily thinking about copy and messaging variants for different regional audiences, visual asset resizing and format adaptation for different media channels, or both? And is the customisation today being done in-house by your team, handed off to a creative agency, or some combination? This will help us calibrate which part of NSOffice AI's workflow is most immediately relevant.
- Q5How is Polycab's marketing leadership currently measuring the throughput and efficiency of the content production function — is there a dashboard or reporting view that tracks how many campaign assets were produced, their average time-to-live, or approval cycle times? I ask because one of the things teams often discover when they implement workflow automation is that they gain visibility into bottlenecks they didn't even know existed, which becomes a powerful internal reporting tool for Amit to show leadership.
Feasibility
FAQs
'We already work with creative agencies who handle the content production and customisation — I'm not sure where an AI workflow tool fits in that model.'
This is exactly the right question, and the answer is: NSOffice AI sits between Amit's team and the agency, not instead of them. Today, the agency relationship is probably managed through a mix of emails, brief documents, revision rounds, and approval WhatsApps — all of which are invisible to anyone not in the thread. Our workflow builder formalises that interface: briefs are submitted through a structured intake form, automatically routed to the right agency contact, revision cycles are tracked, and approvals are logged. The agency keeps doing the creative work; Polycab's team gains visibility and control over the process. For a brand investing heavily in agency retainers across six categories, that transparency alone typically saves 2–3 weeks per quarter in rework and miscommunication.
'NSOffice AI is an office management platform — our need is specifically around marketing content and customised ad creation. I'm not sure this is the right fit.'
This is a fair reframe, and it's worth being precise: what Amit is describing — customised ad production for multiple categories and regional markets — is at its core a workflow and process problem, even if it feels like a creative one. The bottleneck isn't the creativity; it's the briefing, routing, approval, versioning, and distribution steps that wrap around the creative act. NSOffice AI's Workflow Automation is purpose-built for exactly these multi-step, document-and-approval-heavy processes — it just happens that marketing operations is one of the highest-value places to apply it. We're not a content generation tool; we're the operating system that makes content production repeatable, fast, and measurable.
'Budget is tight and we'd need to justify this to finance/leadership before committing — what does this cost and how quickly would we see a return?'
Polycab is a publicly listed company with rigorous capital allocation discipline, so this is exactly the kind of scrutiny we expect and welcome. Our recommended approach for a team in Amit's position is a scoped pilot — one workflow, one product category, 30 days — with a baseline measurement of current campaign cycle time and a post-pilot measurement of time saved. A marketing team producing even 50 regional content variants per month at an average of 3 days-to-live per variant: if the pilot compresses that to 1.5 days, that's 75 person-days recovered per month — a figure that translates cleanly into a cost-per-output comparison against your current agency and team costs. We structure the pilot to produce that ROI evidence for you, so the business case to leadership is built on Polycab's own data, not our benchmarks.
What they appear to run
- Amit Sethiya's LinkedIn profile explicitly lists 'Digital & Social Media Strategy' as a core competency, and Polycab's active presence on Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook confirms an active paid and organic digital marketing operation
- Polycab's FMEG portfolio spanning 6+ categories across regional Indian markets implies a high volume of localised creative assets — a structural driver toward DAM and creative automation tooling
- Amit proactively reached out about 'AI workflows for content creation and customised ads' — direct signal that the current content production stack is insufficient for their needs and they are actively evaluating new tools
- Polycab's scale (200,000+ retail touchpoints, 70+ export countries) implies significant ERP and CRM infrastructure, though specific vendor names are not publicly disclosed
- Polycab is a listed company with quarterly earnings reporting, implying structured BI and analytics tooling at the finance level; marketing analytics maturity is likely lower given the team is being built out under Amit's leadership since Aug 2024
- No public evidence of an existing AI content generation or workflow automation platform in Polycab's marketing stack — the gap Amit is looking to fill is likely a greenfield deployment