India, Aug 20: Criteo, the global commerce intelligence platform, convened industry leaders, marketers, retailers and agency professionals at Criteo Commerce Forum India 2026 to discuss how AI, commerce intelligence and trusted data are transforming the future of digital commerce. Held at The Westin Gurgaon, the 4th annual flagship event showcased Criteo’s commitment to India and how businesses in India can harness AI-driven decisioning, and real-time intelligence to drive measurable business outcomes across the ecosystem as AI-assisted commerce continues to gain traction.
Held under the theme ‘Commerce Intelligence in Action: Making Every Commerce Moment Smarter’, the forum brought together over 200 senior marketing and commerce professionals to explore the evolving role of AI in helping brands navigate an increasingly fragmented omnichannel landscape, strengthen customer engagement and unlock sustainable growth.
The event opened with welcome remarks from Szi-Wei Lo, Executive Managing Director, Criteo APAC, who spoke about India’s fast-evolving digital commerce landscape and Criteo’s long-term commitment to the market.
Marc Fischli, Executive Managing Director, International Markets, Criteo, outlined Criteo’s evolution into the commerce intelligence platform and how AI is reshaping product discovery for brands. He also highlighted that AI is growing the ecommerce pie, enabling commerce to evolve beyond retail media and targeting into truly cross-channel and full-funnel experiences.
Delivering the keynote address, Diarmuid Gill, Chief Technology Officer, Criteo, explained how AI is transforming the commerce ecosystem and demonstrated Criteo’s Agentic Recommendation service, available through its Model Context Protocol (MCP). The service directly connects AI-powered shopping assistants with merchant inventory, translating consumer shopping queries into curated, transaction-ready product recommendations. It enables AI assistants to surface the most relevant products for each individual consumer by applying real-world shopping and purchase signals that cannot be accessed through traditional crawling tactics. He highlighted how these Criteo‘s AI-powered technologies are making commerce smarter today by enabling more intelligent decision-making, improving marketer efficiency and creating more personalized consumer experiences, while emphasizing that AI should not replace human expertise.
The event featured interactive discussions on the future of AI-assisted commerce and concluded with the closing remark by Medhavi Singh, Country Head, Criteo India. Attendees gained practical insights into how commerce intelligence can help businesses stay competitive in an increasingly connected and data-driven world.
Commenting on the event, Diarmuid Gill, Chief Technology Officer, Criteo, said,
“AI is redefining commerce by helping businesses make smarter decisions and deliver more relevant shopper experiences. As adoption grows, success will depend on combining trusted data, strong partnerships, and AI that enhances human decision-making to drive sustainable growth.”
Marc Fischli, Executive Managing Director, International Markets, Criteo, said,
“As commerce evolves into a more cross-channel, full-funnel opportunity, brands that connect trusted commerce data with intelligent technology and strong industry partnerships will be better placed to engage shoppers and drive sustainable growth.”
The forum also showcased real-world examples of how Criteo’s commerce intelligence and AI-powered decisioning are translating into measurable outcomes for brands. Kellogg’s case study demonstrated how Criteo’s cross-channel, full-funnel approach helped drive scaled reach and new-to-brand acquisition, delivering 2.1–2.3 million average weekly reach on OTT and 97% new-to-brand buyers. Driv Vohra, Head of Digital Marketing, Mars Snacking, commented, “Commerce signals are most valuable when they help move beyond audience identification to measurable new-to-brand growth. In our campaign, Criteo used transactional signals to identify relevant breakfast-cereal audiences, build reach through OTT, and extend engagement across Meta and the open web. This cross-channel, full-funnel approach helped connect awareness and consideration with conversion and acquire new customers.”
For Cleartrip, Criteo used intent-based audience targeting, AI-assisted bidding and budget allocation, and personalised creative to re-engage dormant users, reaching 10 million unique users and achieving a 1.5x cost efficiency versus other paid channels and driving a 42% purchase contribution from dormant users. These examples underscored how brands can use commerce signals and intelligent cross-channel activation to move from audience discovery to consideration, conversion and measurable growth.