MAM
Lenexis Foodworks appoints Milind Mhatre as IT head to spice up tech for pan-India expansion
MUMBAI: India’s QSR scene just got an upgrade. The fast-rising homegrown player in India’s quick service restaurant market, Lenexis Foodworks has brought in seasoned tech boss Milind Yashwant Mhatre to run point on its IT game plan. Appointed as business head of IT, Mhatre joins at a time when the company is cooking up serious expansion plans across metros and emerging cities.
With over 19 years of experience in IT ops, Mhatre knows his way around everything from SAP S/4HANA rollouts to ERP and POS system overhauls. He’s handled both in-house tech and outsourced projects, led large teams, and built the kind of resilient infrastructure you want behind a growing food chain with national ambition.
This appointment isn’t just about tech—it’s about scale, speed, and smarts.
“We are at a pivotal stage of growth and our ability to scale responsibly depends on the strength of our leadership. Milind brings a blend of domain expertise, strategic thinking, and executional agility that aligns perfectly with our ambitions. We are building not just a QSR company, but a high-impact organisation driven by talent and purpose,” said Lenexis Foodworks founder & director Aayush Madhusudan Agrawal.
Mhatre will also oversee technology operations at Inspira Global, bolstering the digital backbone of the Lenexis ecosystem. His entry reflects the company’s deeper push into operational efficiency and customer-centric innovation, with tech as the enabler.
As Lenexis moves into its next phase, it isn’t just flipping burgers—it’s flipping the script on what modern Indian QSRs can achieve with the right tech leadership.
AD Agencies
Amazon Ads launches AI tools to build and run campaigns in India
Two new agentic tools promise to slash the time and cost of building and running ad campaigns in India
MUMBAI Amazon Ads has thrown two agentic AI tools into the Indian market – Creative Agent and Ads Agent – and the pitch is blunt: do in hours what once took weeks, at no extra cost, and leave rivals eating algorithmic dust. The e-commerce giant is determined to democratise sophisticated advertising, handing small businesses the same firepower that until now only the biggest brands could afford.
Creative Agent, embedded within Amazon’s Creative Studio, works as a conversational AI creative partner. Click “chat” and it springs to life: researching products and audiences, brainstorming concepts, drafting multi-scene video scripts, generating images, animating scenes, laying in voiceovers and music, and spitting out finished display and video ads. The entire pipeline – from blank page to broadcast-ready creative – runs on Amazon’s own first-party signals, pulling from shopping behaviour, product-detail pages, brand stores and advertiser websites to ensure the final output resonates with real shoppers rather than just ticking creative boxes.
The tool supports multiple formats – Amazon DSP, Sponsored Display, Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Brands Video and Streaming TV – and gives advertisers granular control at every stage, so they can edit everything from the overarching concept to the most minor scene detail without needing a designer or a brief. For a market stuffed with brands that have sharp products but thin creative budgets, that is a significant offer.
“AI is fundamentally changing what is possible in advertising. With Creative Agent and Ads Agent, we are giving every advertiser access to AI-powered intelligence and our insights be it a small business or an established brand. Our AI-powered tools help them create smarter, launch faster, and drive stronger business outcomes at every stage of the campaign lifecycle.” – Girish Prabhu, vice-president and head, Amazon Ads India.
The proof of concept is already in circulation. Frido, a growing Indian consumer brand, used early access to Creative Agent to run a Streaming TV campaign ahead of a sale event. Ganesh Sonawane, chief executive of Frido, is unequivocal: “Creative Agent removes that compromise entirely. We were able to launch our Streaming TV campaign for a sale event faster than ever – and the results were immediate.” The click-through rate for that campaign was 40 per cent higher than usual, Sonawane says, adding that the brand is now “testing more concepts, launching faster, and seeing stronger results, without increasing our creative spend.”
Running the numbers
The second tool, Ads Agent, tackles the unglamorous grind of campaign management. Currently live within Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) and heading to Amazon Ads Campaign Manager later this year, it automates the tasks that consume disproportionate hours: identifying audience segments, adjusting pacing across hundreds of simultaneous campaigns, and generating SQL queries for advanced analytics – all through plain-language conversation rather than lines of code.
Advertisers can upload a custom media plan and let Ads Agent construct a campaign structure and ad groups. The tool then reviews thousands of audience segments to surface the most relevant Amazon audiences and keywords, serves them up for human review, and applies approved choices at scale. For AMC users, it translates business questions into complex SQL queries in real time, collapsing what was once a specialist task into a conversational exchange.
Amazon frames both tools as part of a broader full-funnel advertising proposition that already spans Prime Video, Amazon MX Player and third-party publishers, with generative AI now stitched throughout the creative and campaign layer. The company claims that combining first-party shopping signals with agentic AI delivers “accuracy and depth that drives real business outcomes” – a claim Frido’s 40 per cent CTR uplift lends at least some early credibility to.
