Over the next three years, 92% of companies plan to increase their artificial intelligence investments, according to a 2025 global report. Assistant Professor of Marketing Mainak Sarkar — an expert in AI marketing — is preparing the next generation of professionals for this paradigm shift in UM-Dearborn’s College of Business classrooms.
Sarkar, who started at COB in Fall 2024, recently worked as an assistant professor at University of Stavanger in Norway and was a visiting scholar at UM-Ann Arbor’s Ross School of Business after earning his doctorate in marketing in 2022 from ESSEC Business School in France. His AI-focused dissertation led to Sarkar having one of the most downloaded papers on SSRN’s e-library in the areas of customer relationship management, managerial marketing and marketing science.
Drawing from his research, Sarkar is currently developing a new marketing analytics course — which will be offered during the 2025-26 academic year — to get UM-Dearborn students familiar with a variety of marketing models. "The course is for students to be knowledgeable about the existing traditional approaches of doing marketing analytics and know how to leverage the latest AI methods,” he says. “It's important to be prepared for today and for the future."
As focused as Sarkar is on teaching business and optimizing AI technologies for business use, he didn’t start there. As a young adult in India, where Sarkar grew up, he originally went into a field where he’d quickly land a job. “Information technology in India is quite big and I was focused on where I could get a job once I graduated,” says Sarkar, who earned a bachelor of technology degree from West Bengal University of Technology in Kolkata in 2011.
After a couple years working as an IT professional, Sarkar realized that he needed to follow his passion for the business field. “When you are doing something purely engineering-oriented, you see how the technical side of things work. That’s very good, but you are missing that understanding of your work’s larger purpose, the business side. I had a lot of curiosity,” he says. “I’d read business books about finance and marketing — I’d try to read everything I could when it came to business topics. My interest and curiosity was so strong that I decided it’s a world I wanted to explore.” Sarkar earned his MBA from the Management Development Institute in Gurgaon in 2015.
Sarkar blended his IT background with business strategy when he took a marketing role with a financial services company shortly after earning his MBA. “I was devising all these strategies that would be pitched to the customer as they moved along their relationship with the company. For example, if someone takes a certain loan for a two-year period — I’d use programming and data to look into what would be the best next product to sell to that customer,” he says. “I found those projects really interesting, and that made me want to delve even deeper into marketing.”
Then a major event dominated the conversation in Sarkar’s professional social circles: the DeepMind Challenge Match. In 2016, the AI bot AlphaGo beat the world’s best player of Go, a board game that’s considered more complex than chess. “Not only that, it was able to come up with completely new moves which humans had never thought about previously,” Sarkar says. “That got my attention and made me realize that AI is going to be something very important in the coming years.”
Thinking about his marketing work with the bank, Sarkar realized that AI could optimize managing customer relationships. “From a business side, AI customer relationship models can help you target customers better, which can lead to more profits. From the customer side, you can better personalize the experience and quickly connect them with what they may want or need,” he says. “So I would say AI can create a win-win for both the customer and the business.” And that led Sarkar to return to school — this time for a doctorate in marketing — to research AI in marketing.
Sarkar’s dissertation research led to a publication that was the first of its kind. He showed how deep-learning sequence models in customer relationship management systems can be more effective and efficient than traditional marketing methods. “Natural language models are trained to predict the next word in a sentence. If you repeat that for enough number of times, it develops an understanding of an overall topic, which can lead to it answering different questions that you can ask it,” says Sarkar, noting a chatbot can be an example of a natural language model. “My research was on using these kinds of language models and not just using them to develop chatbots — but to develop customer relationship models that can predict and analyze customer behavior. My research showed that it can predict, with high accuracy, how customer behavior will unfold.”
Seeing the power of AI, Sarkar — just as the 2025 report points out — expects to see it used more and more in business. He wants to teach the next generation of professionals how to effectively implement it when it comes to marketing strategies. And UM-Dearborn is the right place for him to do that.
“UM-Dearborn is special because it has smaller class sizes and this allows me to provide more individualized attention to our students,” he says. “The University of Michigan brand has a reputation for developing leaders and it is an honor to teach here.”
Story by Sarah Tuxbury
