Brands
Airtel names Shreyas Mehrotra CMO and digital sales head
GURUGRAM: Bharti Airtel has handed a bigger brief to one of its key marketing architects. Shreyas Mehrotra has been appointed chief marketing officer and head of digital sales at Airtel Business, marking a new chapter in the company’s push to scale its B2B ambitions.
Mehrotra will continue to lead marketing for Nxtra by Airtel and Airtel Digital, now rebranded as Xtelify, alongside his expanded responsibilities. The move signals Airtel’s intent to bring sharper focus to digital-led growth, cloud services and a more distinctive business brand voice.
Airtel insiders credit Mehrotra with helping reshape the company’s B2B narrative since he moved to Airtel Business in 2022. During this period, he played a central role in accelerating the cloud and digital platform strategy, anchored by the launch of Airtel Cloud, the rollout of Xtelify and a clearer, more confident market presence across enterprise segments.
Having joined Airtel in 2018, Mehrotra has worn several hats across the organisation. His early years saw him lead brand marketing for the consumer business, including major portfolio launches. He later steered the category strategy for Airtel Black, the company’s first converged offering across mobility, broadband and DTH, aimed squarely at high value customers.
In his new role, Mehrotra will focus on scaling marketing and digital sales at Airtel Business, an operation that manages a business of around 3 billion dollars. His mandate includes driving growth through sharper go to market strategies, smarter digital journeys and deeper use of technology, including generative AI, to improve conversions and productivity.
The appointment caps a career that spans consumer goods, startups and telecom, with stints at Marico, Ola, Tata Teleservices and TaxiForSure. Along the way, Mehrotra has picked up industry recognition, including Assocam Marketing Leader of the Year 2025 and multiple awards for marketing and martech innovation.
For Airtel Business, the message is clear. As competition heats up in cloud and enterprise services, the company is betting on a seasoned marketer to keep the story simple, the brand sharp and growth firmly on the agenda.
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.
