Brands
ITC Vivel ropes in Kriti Sanon as its new Brand Face
MUMBAI: ITC’s leading personal care brand, Vivel has roped in popular Bollywood actress Kriti Sanon as its brand ambassador. Vivel with its philosophy of ‘Ab Samjhauta Nahin’ encourages women to not compromise with their choices and their dreams. Kriti embodies the brand persona and is a leading role model for young women.
Vivel announces its association with Kriti Sanon with a campaign for its cooling portfolio of soaps and bodywashes. With ingredients like Mint and Cucumber, Vivel promises a refreshing bathing experience with the onset of summer.
Kriti as the brand ambassador for Vivel encourages women to make their own choices and live a life of no compromise. She is self-made and continually takes up roles that challenges the status quo and the perception of women in society. This is what makes her an ideal Vivel Woman.
The film conceptualised by Brand David, opens in a busy traffic jam with Kriti as the Traffic Police officer in the sweltering summer heat. Kriti portrays the progressive and confident woman who refuses to succumb to everyday sexist jibes, voicing a befitting quick comeback, while she continues to keep her cool. The brand message goes beyond beauty to address attitude and behaviour towards women and personifies a nuanced perspective of self-confidence that inspires the protagonist to voice her opinion and handle the situation with wit.
Kriti Sanon, shared her excitement on being the new face of Vivel, “I am excited and proud to be associated with leading personal care brand ITC Vivel and look forward to joining the brand’s strong purpose-driven journey through its initiative Ab Samjhauta Nahin. The brand’s core narrative of being more than just a beauty discourse makes it extremely fulfilling for me to associate myself with both the product and the philosophy. Vivel’s beauty is real and uncompromising and hence being the Vivel woman comes very naturally to me. As a woman with a voice, I have achieved my dreams through my uncompromising spirit. It indeed is great that I get to be associated with brand that strives to help young women find their voice & inspire them to say ‘Ab Samjhauta Nahin’.”
Speaking on the occasion, ITC Limited chief executive, personal care products business Sameer Satpathy said, “Kriti is one of the most dynamic new age Bollywood actors. Vivel with its philosophy of Ab Samjhauta Nahin seeks to inspire women to question the limits they’ve been conditioned into accepting, challenge status quo and therefore enrich their lives with confidence and fulfilment.”
The Vivel Cool Mint variant offers a refreshing aroma with a long-lasting fragrance, and offers a minty freshness that hydrating the skin while getting rid of the dirt and grime that settles in, causing build up through the course of the day.
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.
