MAM
Microsoft AI welcomes Umesh Shankar as VP, engineering for AI safety
Mumbai: Microsoft AI has appointed Umesh Shankar as corporate vice president of engineering, where he will spearhead initiatives in AI innovation, security and privacy.Shankar brings nearly two decades of experience from Google, where he served as chief technologist for Google Cloud Security and engineering director for Google Assistant Ecosystem. His work focused on strengthening AI security frameworks and advancing data protection to enhance user trust and safety.
At Microsoft, he will direct efforts to develop responsible AI, ensuring secure and ethical AI integration across products and services. His appointment underscores Microsoft’s commitment to advancing AI with robust privacy and security standards, reinforcing its global AI-driven strategy.
His work focused on making GCP the safest environment for AI development and leveraging AI to tackle critical security challenges, such as cloud posture management, threat intelligence, fraud prevention, and secops. Prior to this, he was engineering director for Google Assistant’s Ecosystem, handle a team of 180 engineers across global locations to develop AI-driven services like duplex on the web, actions on Google, identity and transactions APIs. His earlier tenure at Google also included pioneering efforts in data protection, key management, authentication, authorization, auditing, and insider risk controls, building security infrastructure used across Google’s products and services. Notably, he led the access transparency project, providing Google Cloud customers with real-time logs of data access events, unlocking nearly 900 million dollars in revenue. Before joining Google, he held roles as an advisor at LiquidTalent, a research intern at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, and a software engineer at Idiom Technologies.
Shankar holds a PhD and M.S. in Computer Science with a focus on security and privacy from the University of California, Berkeley, and a B.A. in Computer Science from Harvard University. His extensive expertise in AI security and privacy positions him to play a crucial role in shaping Microsoft AI’s responsible AI initiatives and strengthening its global AI-driven strategy.
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Abhay Duggal joins JioStar as director of Hindi GEC ad sales
The streaming giant brings in a seasoned revenue hand as the battle for Hindi television advertising heats up
MUMBAI: Abhay Duggal has a new desk, and JioStar has a new weapon. The media and entertainment veteran has joined JioStar as director of entertainment ad sales for Hindi general entertainment channels, adding 17 years of hard-won revenue experience to one of India’s most powerful broadcasting operations.
Duggal is no stranger to big portfolios or bruising markets. Before joining JioStar, he spent a brief stint at Republic World as deputy general manager and north regional head for ad sales. Before that, he put in three years at Enterr10 Television, where he ran the north region for Dangal TV and Dangal 2, two of India’s leading free-to-air Hindi channels. The north alone accounted for more than 50 per cent of total channel revenue on his watch, a number that tends to get attention in any sales meeting.
His longest stint was at Zee Entertainment Enterprises, where he spent over six years rising to associate director of sales. There he commanded the Hindi movies cluster across seven channels, owned more than half of north India’s revenue across flagship properties including Zee TV and &TV, and closed marquee sponsorships across the Indian Premier League, Zee Rishtey Awards and Dance India Dance. He also handled monetisation for the English movies and entertainment cluster and the global news channel WION, a portfolio that would stretch most sales teams twice his size.
Earlier in his career Duggal closed what was then a Rs 3 crore single deal at Reliance Broadcast Network, one of the largest in Indian radio at the time, before that he helped launch and monetise JAINHITS, India’s first HITS-based cable and satellite platform.
His edge, by his own account, lies in marrying data and instinct: translating audience trends, inventory signals and client demands into long-term partnerships built on cost-per-rating-point discipline rather than short-term deal chasing. In a media landscape being reshaped by streaming, fragmented attention and AI-driven advertising, that kind of rigour is increasingly rare and increasingly valuable.
JioStar, which blends the scale of Reliance’s Jio platform with the content firepower of Star, is doubling down on its advertising business at precisely the moment the Hindi GEC market is getting more competitive. Bringing in someone who has spent nearly two decades doing exactly this, across some of India’s most watched channels, is a pointed statement of intent. Duggal has spent his career turning audiences into revenue. JioStar is clearly betting he can do it again, and bigger.
