MAM
Dentsu India promotes Rahul Vengalil to Managing Partner, Isobar
New Delhi: Isobar, the creative experience agency from dentsu India has promoted Rahul Vengalil to the role of managing partner.
Vengalil will report into Isobar India group CEO Heeru Dingra and will be responsible for building the business with creative & experience as the key focus for future growth.
Rahul’s digital expertise cuts across capabilities in business transformation, strategy, branding, experience, and innovation. Erstwhile, chief business officer (CBO), he has played an active role in driving the Isobar India growth story to newer heights and has added significant brands to the agency’s client roster, augmenting Isobar’s creative line of business exponentially, said the agency on Monday.
His first stint with Isobar India was in the year 2011 when he joined the agency as senior group head, and expanded the agency’s footprint across India, and set up Isobar’s first South branch in Bangalore. He moved on from Isobar at the start of 2017 to launch his own Audit & Digital transformation company – What Clicks and returned to the agency in 2020.
Speaking on the appointment, Isobar India group CEO Heeru Dingra said, “The solutions we offer are led by talents who possess extraordinary skillsets. Rahul is one of our finest resources with key domain expertise and with the thrill to set up new standards each time. His strategic-led, client-centric approach is in sync with our offerings. We are certain that he will accelerate Isobar’s growth trajectory for India.”
Commenting on his elevation, Vengalil added, “I am extremely excited to begin this fresh chapter at Isobar India. My experience with Isobar has transformed my journey; and now is the time to set up new benchmarks. We have an awesome team of innovative and creative folks who are aligned with Isobar’s global vision of transforming into the most creative experience agency, worldwide. With our ‘Invent Make Change’ agenda, we are committed to being instrumental in creating an experience economy within India.”
Brands
Samsung certifies 1,000 Maharashtra students in AI and coding
The South Korean electronics giant marks its first large-scale skilling push in the state, with women making up nearly half the national programme’s enrolment
PUNE: Samsung has put 1,000 students in Maharashtra through a certified training programme in artificial intelligence and coding, the largest such drive the South Korean electronics company has run in the state and a signal that corporate India’s skilling ambitions are moving well beyond the boardroom brochure.
The certifications were awarded under Samsung Innovation Campus (SIC), the company’s flagship corporate social responsibility programme, which launched in India in 2022 with the stated aim of democratising access to future-technology education. The 1,000 graduates were drawn from four institutions: 127 from Savitribai Phule Pune University, 373 from Pimpri Chinchwad University, 250 from D.Y. Patil University’s Ramrao Adik Institute of Technology and 250 from Anjuman-I-Islam’s Kalsekar Technical Campus. All completed training in either AI or coding and programming, the two disciplines Samsung has identified as the critical pillars of the digital economy.
The programme does not stop at technical training. Soft-skills development and career-readiness modules are baked into the curriculum, a deliberate attempt to close the gap between what universities teach and what employers actually want.
“India’s digital growth story will ultimately be shaped by the quality of its talent pipeline,” said Shubham Mukherjee, head of CSR and corporate communications at Samsung Southwest Asia. “As technologies like AI move from the periphery to the core of industries, skilling must evolve from basic training to building real-world capability. This milestone in Maharashtra reflects how industry and academia can come together to create a future-ready workforce that is both globally competitive and locally relevant.”
The Maharashtra drive sits within a rapidly scaling national effort. Samsung Innovation Campus trained 20,000 young people across India in 2025, hitting its stated target for the year. Women account for 48 per cent of national enrolments, a figure the company cites as evidence of its push for an inclusive technology ecosystem. The programme is implemented in partnership with the Electronics Sector Skills Council of India and the Telecom Sector Skill Council.
Samsung, which is marking 30 years in India this year, runs SIC alongside two other initiatives, Samsung Solve for Tomorrow and Samsung DOST, as part of a broader effort to build what it calls a generation of innovators with both the technical depth and the problem-solving mindset to thrive in a fast-moving digital world.
A thousand certified students is a tidy headline. Whether they find jobs that match their new skills is the harder question, and the one that will ultimately determine whether corporate skilling programmes like this one are genuine pipelines or well-photographed gestures.
