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Blinkit promotes Sumit Garg to associate director
GURUGRAM: Blinkit has elevated Sumit Garg to the role of associate director, marking a key step up for the operations leader within India’s rapidly evolving quick commerce landscape.
In his new position, Garg is set to help steer strategic initiatives and sharpen operational efficiency as Blinkit continues its expansion under the Zomato Group umbrella. The promotion reflects a steady rise through the company’s ranks, built on a mix of programme management, cross-functional coordination, and supply chain optimisation.
Garg joined Blinkit in 2021 and has since progressed through multiple leadership roles, from manager II to programme manager, then senior programme manager, before stepping into the associate director position in January 2026. His work has largely centred on streamlining fulfilment processes, improving capacity planning, and tightening the operational playbook for high-velocity grocery delivery.
Before Blinkit, he held roles at Flipkart, where he managed pan-India fulfilment centre operations for grocery e-commerce, and earlier at Ajio and Snapdeal, focusing on customer experience analytics, process design, and order lifecycle improvements. Across these roles, he built a reputation for reducing delivery bottlenecks, improving return processes, and driving data-led operational decisions.
With more than a decade of experience across some of India’s biggest e-commerce platforms, Garg’s promotion signals Blinkit’s continued focus on operational depth as the quick commerce race intensifies.
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Practo names Cijo George as vice president of artificial intelligence
New vice president of artificial intelligence to mine healthcare data and sharpen care delivery
BENGALURU: India’s healthtech race just picked up speed. Practo has appointed Cijo George as vice president of artificial intelligence, tasking him with wiring AI deep into the company’s sprawling healthcare platform.
George will steer AI strategy and execution, embedding machine intelligence across care navigation, doctor-facing tools and overall platform intelligence. He will work across product, engineering and clinical teams to rewire how patients search for and access care — and how doctors deliver treatment with greater consistency and precision.
He reports directly to Shashank ND, co-founder and chief executive officer.
Shashank ND said years of building healthcare data across patients, providers and treatment outcomes had laid the foundation for more advanced AI applications. Artificial intelligence, he added, can unlock the value of that data to improve patient outcomes and equip doctors with actionable insights. He described George’s experience in building production-grade AI systems as closely aligned with Practo’s long-term vision.
George brings nearly two decades of experience spanning machine learning, AI platforms and product engineering. Most recently at Observe.AI, he led work on large-scale AI systems deployed by global enterprises. Before that, at Belong.co, he drove platform and AI initiatives focused on search and personalisation in the HR technology space. He also worked with the Advanced Technology Group at NetApp, contributing to machine-learning and data-science projects for distributed systems.
An alumnus of the Indian Institute of Science with a master’s degree in high performance computing, George said the chance to apply AI to directly improve patient experience and clinical delivery drew him to the role. Practo’s scale and its extensive longitudinal healthcare data, he added, offer significant room for innovation.
The move comes as digital health platforms double down on artificial intelligence to boost patient engagement, streamline provider workflows and sharpen decision-making. For Practo, the prescription is clear: turn data into diagnosis, and algorithms into advantage.
