If you run a small business in India — a café in Koramangala, a boutique in Bandra, a coaching centre in Lucknow — you already know the problem. You’re wearing every hat. You’re the accountant, the customer support rep, the logistics person, and the one who’s supposed to post “engaging content” on Instagram three times a week.

Marketing, for most small businesses, isn’t strategy. It’s stress.

Google seems to have noticed.

On February 26, the company rolled out Pomelli AI in India — an AI-powered marketing tool, built by Google Labs in collaboration with DeepMind, that’s been quietly running in beta in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand since October last year. Now it’s here. And weirdly, for once, the India launch actually feels like it was *designed* for India, not just ported over with a translated landing page.

Point Pomelli at your website. It figures out the rest.

Here’s the short version: you give it your website URL, and it figures out your brand.

Not in a vague, hand-wavy way. It scans your site — the copy, the colours, the fonts, the images, the overall vibe — and builds what Google calls a “Business DNA” profile. Think of it as a cheat sheet that captures your brand’s personality in a way that’s actually usable. Once it has that, it can generate social media posts, ad creatives, captions, campaign ideas, even product photography — all tailored to look and sound like *your* brand, not some generic template.

The whole thing takes minutes, not weeks. No brand kit to upload. No creative brief to write. You just point it at your website and let it work.

There’s also a feature called Photoshoot that takes your regular product photos and turns them into studio-quality shots. You know those clean, well-lit images you see on D2C websites and wonder how much they spent on a photographer? That’s what this does. Except it doesn’t cost you ₹50,000 and a weekend.

And then there’s Pomelli Animate — a newer addition powered by Google DeepMind’s Veo 3.1. It takes static creatives and turns them into short-form videos. Reels, Shorts, TikTok-style clips. The kind of content that actually gets reach in 2026.

👉 READ MORE: Deep dive into the Instagram content system that actually gets you reach in 2026!

63 million businesses, almost none with a marketing budget

Look, Google launches things all the time. A new tool here, a rebrand there. Most of it doesn’t move the needle for everyday people. But this one’s a bit different, and here’s why.

India has somewhere around 63 million MSMEs. The vast majority of them don’t have a marketing budget. They don’t have a designer on call. They definitely don’t have a social media manager. What they *do* have is a phone, an internet connection, and a desperate need to look professional online — because increasingly, that’s where their customers are making decisions.

Pomelli AI directly addresses that gap. And Google seems serious about making it stick here. The India rollout includes support for multiple Indian languages, cultural tuning (so your generated content doesn’t feel like it was written by someone who’s never set foot in the country). And the most interesting part — **18 months of free access**, reportedly in partnership with Reliance Jio.

Eighteen months. Free. For a tool that would otherwise require you to either hire someone or spend hours fumbling through Canva templates and ChatGPT prompts.

That’s not a trial. That’s a runway.

Part about Pomelli that’s actually interesting (& maybe slightly unsettling)

There’s a bigger story here that most coverage seems to gloss over: Pomelli AI doesn’t just generate content. It learns your brand and stays on brand.

That’s a meaningful distinction. Anyone can throw a prompt into an AI tool and get a passable Instagram caption. But getting one that actually sounds like your business, uses the right tone, references the right visual language, feels consistent across posts — that’s harder. That’s the part that usually requires a human who understands your brand deeply.

Pomelli tries to automate that understanding. And from what early users in the US beta have reported, it does a surprisingly decent job. Not perfect. Not “fire your marketing team” good. But good enough that a one-person operation can start putting out content that looks like it came from a team of five.

For a country where the majority of businesses are literally one-person or family-run operations, that’s a big deal.

Before you get too excited

Worth noting: Pomelli AI doesn’t publish anything for you. There’s no direct integration with Instagram or Facebook or LinkedIn. You generate the content, download it, and upload it yourself. It also doesn’t run ads for you — it’s not a Google Ads tool, despite what the name might suggest.

So it’s not a complete marketing autopilot. It’s more like a really smart intern who’s great at design and copy but still needs you to hit “post.”

Honestly? For most small businesses, that’s probably fine. The bottleneck was never the posting — it was the *creating*.

Who this changes things for?

If you’re running a business and you’ve been putting off “doing something about social media” because it felt overwhelming, expensive, or just not worth the time — yeah, you should probably give this a look. It’s free, it’s fast, and the barrier to entry is basically having a website.

If you’re a freelance designer or social media manager, this is worth paying attention to for a different reason. Not because it’s going to replace you tomorrow — it won’t. The output still needs a human eye. But it *will* change what your clients expect. When a free tool can generate 80% of what they need, the remaining 20% you provide better be exceptional.

And if you’re just someone who likes watching how tech plays out in India’s wildly diverse market — this is going to be a fascinating experiment. Google is essentially betting that AI can bridge the gap between having a business and having a *brand*. In a country of 63 million small businesses, most of whom have never had access to professional marketing tools, that bet could reshape how an entire generation of entrepreneurs shows up online.

No pressure, Google.