Financial Express: AI Misrepresents India’s Regulated Brands

Ambika Sharma wrote this column for Financial Express BrandWagon, published with a 3 June 2026 update. It argues that AI answers leave 68 percent of regulated brands out of the responses their own customers and investors receive, misstate the facts of many others, and that AI visibility governance has become a decision for the board.

Absence is the first failure

The column opens on what customers and investors see when they ask AI about regulated brands. Sixty-eight percent of those brands do not appear in the answer at all. Ambika Sharma separates two failures here. A misquoted brand is at least part of the conversation. An absent brand is not, and its absence is harder to notice.

Of the brands AI does name, the column reports that more than half are misrepresented: credited with licenses they do not hold, or attributed to corporate structures that no longer exist.

Eight audits, regulator-grade errors

Ambika Sharma describes NeuroRank audits of eight regulated brands across India and the US, run in March and April 2026. Each gap was classified through ORHL: Omitted, Replaced, Hallucinated, Zero Leads. The Indian findings carried the heaviest consequences.

The column gives three examples. A large financial services group was described by AI as a bank or a general lending NBFC, when it is regulated as a Core Investment Company under RBI directions. LIC’s sovereign guarantee, which exists under Section 37 of the LIC Act, 1956, was mischaracterized in some AI outputs. And a large bank was still described as a standalone housing finance entity nearly three years after its 2023 merger closed. These came from ordinary customer prompts.

The exposure can be calculated

The column gives marketing teams a way to size the risk. Start with the marketing budget. Take the share of customer acquisition that runs through digital channels. Multiply by the percentage of category AI prompts in which the brand is Omitted, Replaced, Hallucinated, or left with Zero Leads. The result is exposed acquisition spend: money buying customers the brand never gets to address.

For most regulated enterprise brands, Sharma writes, that figure can run into hundreds of crores a year, and most marketing teams have never calculated it. False information, she adds, may cost more than the lost revenue.

Governance sits with the board

The decision she puts to every BFSI company is a single one: does AI visibility report into the board? If it does, the General Counsel or Chief Risk Officer chairs the discipline, marketing executes, and the review runs monthly. If it does not, the firm inherits whatever AI representation others shape for it.

Her closing argument concerns timing. The brands governing AI visibility this year are setting the disclosure template their regulator is likely to adopt. Those that wait will inherit someone else’s.

Captured outputs, not claims about the brands

The column carries a disclaimer. Every brand-specific misrepresentation it describes is an AI output captured during live audits on the NeuroRank platform in March and April 2026, not a statement by Pulp Strategy or NeuroRank about the brands. The brands are licensed, regulated entities in good standing. Regulatory facts come from official filings, regulator publications, and parliamentary records, and AI outputs may have changed since the audits.

The column’s opening states the problem in two short sentences.