Brands
Pine Labs appoints Shalini Pillai as CMO
Former Microsoft marketing director to steer global brand
MUMBAI: Fintech platform Pine Labs has named Shalini Pillai as its new chief marketing officer, handing her the reins of global marketing, product marketing, marcom and brand positioning as the company sharpens its worldwide ambitions.
Pillai joins from Microsoft, where she served as marketing director for India and South Asia. Her career reads like a tour of modern tech marketing. At Google, she led consumer apps marketing in India, steered GPay and new business initiatives marketing, and earlier drove growth across the India SMB segment. Long before big tech, she co-founded BrandIdea Consultancy, building tools for market planning and ROI analytics, and began her journey at Coca-Cola India in sales and brand roles.
An MBA from the Indian School of Business, Pillai brings more than two decades of experience spanning boardrooms and bootstraps, B2C buzz and B2B backbone.
Announcing the appointment, Pine Labs chief executive B. Amrish Rau said Pillai’s technology-led marketing pedigree and data-driven approach make her well placed to lead the company’s next chapter of transformation and growth. He noted her track record in scaling digital products and building integrated brand and product engines across global markets.
For her part, Pillai sees fintech’s future in seamless infrastructure. She described Pine Labs as sitting at the crossroads of merchant relationships and sovereign-scale technology, turning consumer intent into instant execution. Her mandate is clear: craft an integrated market strategy and expand the company’s footprint to deliver compounding commercial value worldwide.
The move comes as Pine Labs doubles down on artificial intelligence across its payments stack and developer tools, and deepens its collaboration with OpenAI. With a seasoned marketer now at the helm, the company appears ready to tell its next growth story with sharper focus and a louder voice.
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.
