Election 2.0: There's a new political guru in town, and it doesn't eat, sleep or blink

NEW DELHI: For a decade, Prashant Kishor has been India’s undisputed master craftsman of elections, the strategist who could bend narratives, stitch coalitions and turn sentiment into seats to deliver wins for major politicians. The 2025 Bihar assembly polls, however, delivered a jolt: Kishor, despite months of padyatras, booth-level outreach and the full weight of Jan Suraaj, failed to win a single seat.

The upset was more than a personal setback. It signalled a shift already unfolding beneath the surface: the old era of political strategy, built on instinct, experience and human networks, is being steadily eclipsed by a new actor that never tires, never forgets and never stops optimising.

The 2020s have introduced a political strategist unlike any before: Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Always awake, endlessly scalable and capable of producing personalised persuasion at a fraction of the cost of a conventional campaign team. By 2025, influence is no longer crafted by professionals in war rooms; it is engineered by algorithms fine-tuned to voters’ moods in real-time.

The story is no longer only about deepfakes. This is no longer simply about mimicking politicians or reviving long-deceased icons of a political past. The larger threat and opportunity lie in AI’s capacity for persuasion.

Studies published this year show that AI chatbots can shift voting attitudes at rates far higher than traditional advertising. Politicians once needed speeches, rallies and media placements to move the needle. In 2024, a ten-message exchange with a chatbot has been shown to deliver greater impact than a multimillion-dollar television campaign.

How AI has slipped into elections

Artificial intelligence has crept into election campaigns around the world, not as a novelty but as a tool for influence. In the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, political parties harnessed generative AI to navigate the country’s linguistic diversity, translating speeches into regional languages and producing personalised outreach that addressed local audiences.

AI tools also created images, videos and voice clips that were widely shared on social media and messaging apps, blurring the line between genuine and fake political content.

In the United States, AI was used less for resurrecting figures than for shaping narratives. Advanced models generated millions of messages, memes and automated responses designed to appeal to specific voter groups, turning broad campaigning into hyper-targeted persuasion.

MIT researchers have documented how AI can produce and test myriad versions of political content, learning over time which messages resonate most.

Okay, but why should I care?

What makes the current wave of AI so powerful isn’t just its reach, but its precision. Campaign tech can tailor content not just for broad demographics, but for specific segments — and increasingly, for individuals.

Using voter data and language models, parties can now generate personalised videos, voice messages or WhatsApp clips that address voters by name or reference hyper-local issues. In India’s 2024 elections, some campaigns reportedly used AI to send personalised campaign messages to local volunteers or voters with voice-cloned content that sounded like a regional leader speaking directly to them.

Here’s an example: below are two images placed side by side — one is real, and the other has been altered using AI. Can you tell which is which?


If you’re comfortable with tech, the “obvious” choice might be the right-hand image as the AI-generated one. But in a world already overwhelmed with information and shrinking attention spans, it’s easy for many people to be misled.

Not long ago, creating such an edit with traditional software would have taken hours of careful work. Now, AI can produce it in minutes with nothing more than a simple prompt.

How India coped with AI in elections

India’s size, linguistic diversity and enormous WhatsApp economy made it a live laboratory for election-grade AI. During the 2024 Lok Sabha campaign, parties experimented with voice clones, personalised videos and hyper-local ads that would once have required expensive local teams. Media reporting found that synthetic videos and voice cloning were deployed to reach voters in their own languages and dialects, sometimes resurrecting familiar faces to prompt nostalgia or loyalty. Deepfakes of late leaders such as M Karunanidhi and audio clones of Jayalalithaa circulated in campaign pockets and on WhatsApp.

The 2025 Delhi election cycle illustrated the same duality of benefit and risk. Parties used AI to create slick creatives and chatbots that answered voters’ queries about municipal schemes and polling logistics.


Rival campaigns, meanwhile, weaponised visuals and memes that many AI produced to caricature opponents and to amplify outrage on social platforms.



Bihar showed how regulators and institutions had to catch up. Ahead of state polls, authorities moved to require labels and disclosures for AI content and warned parties about misuse. The Election Commission issued advisories asking parties to identify AI-created or digitally enhanced material and to remove misleading content promptly. That reflected mounting official concern that unlabelled synthetic media could distort voters’ understanding of where, when and how to vote.

When the dead returned to campaign

In Tamil Nadu politics, AI influence crossed into theatrical territory. Actor-politician Vijay’s party, Tamizhaga Vetri Kazhagam (TVK), released an AI-generated video showing CN Annadurai the iconic founder of rival DMK , appearing to endorse Vijay’s leadership over MK Stalin. The synthetic content drew widespread attention for its audacity and emotional appeal, using the late leader’s likeness and voice patterns in a campaign context.

What AI can do: a short practical guide

AI platforms can be combined into simple, high-impact campaign stacks.

Real-time translation and localisation: Tools such as the Indian government’s Bhashini are already being used to translate speeches in real time and reach multilingual audiences in a single event. That makes national figures intelligible across linguistic divides.

Personalised media: AI can insert a person’s name into a video or voice message, speak in a local dialect, and reference a local scheme to create the feel of a one-to-one conversation.

Chatbots and P2P messaging: Campaign chatbots on messaging apps can answer voter queries, persuade undecided voters and provide step-by-step voting information. Early field trials suggest conversational bots can move turnout modestly when used responsibly.

Synthetic resurrection: Voice cloning and face generation can create speeches and visuals of public figures, living or deceased. This can be used for commemorations or to amplify nostalgia, but it also creates a potent vector for deception.

Micro-testing at scale: AI enables the automated generation of hundreds of message permutations and near-instant A/B testing to identify what language or framing works for which segment.

The ethical and regulatory fault lines

The promise of AI for civic inclusion is real. Translation and simplification can make policy accessible. Chatbots can help elderly or remote voters get polling details. Yet the same features that improve outreach also enable deception at scale. The question facing democracies is not whether to use AI but how to shape rules and infrastructure so the technology empowers voters and not predators.

Regulatory responses are emerging. The EC has moved to require prominent labelling of synthetic material and to instruct parties to maintain records of AI-created campaign content. Platforms have experimented with provenance labels and ad disclosure rules. At the technical level, researchers and agencies push watermarking, provenance metadata and detection tools.

The strategist is no longer human

The lesson from recent elections is clear: AI hasn’t stolen votes, but it has quietly entered the game, learning fast and growing harder to contain with every cycle. Its impact depends on public awareness, transparency, and ethical use.

Campaigns have always combined messaging, persuasion, and spectacle. AI doesn’t change politics; it accelerates it, sharpens it, and scales it beyond human limits. Just as TV reshaped image and social media reshaped attention, AI is reshaping trust.

The strategist is no longer only human. That voice in your phone, that video in your feed, even that argument that swayed you, it may never have come from a person at all.



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