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Weekend Unwind with: The Rabbit Hole business head Rishabh Khatter
Mumbai: Another weekend is upon us, and so is the time to unwind with yet another edition of Indiantelevision.com’s Weekend Unwind—a series of informal chats that peek into the minds of corporate executives. In this week’s session we have The Rabbit Hole business head Rishabh Khatter opening up the windows to his thoughts.
Having joined FoxyMoron as a senior creative innovations associate in 2015, Rishabh moved up the ranks to spearhead The Rabbit Hole as its business head (content and technology). He is credited with not only developing sustainable business units but also being the creator of The Rabbit Hole-content, successfully marrying content with technology to develop solutions for various brands.
Under his mantle, it has evolved from being a digital video first agency to a full-service new age content creation ecosystem. Led by Rishabh, the mission of The Rabbit Hole is to turn ideas into reality and deliver outputs that cut through the clutter.
So here goes:
Your mantra for Life
Acknowledge the good times amid a hard time.
A Book you are currently reading/plan to read
Shoe Dog by Phil Knight.
Your Fitness mantra, especially during the pandemic
Swimming.
Your comfort Food
Chicken wings.
When the chips are down a Quote/Philosophy that keeps you going
This too shall pass.
Your Guilty pleasure
Watching films and shows below a rating of two on IMDB.
When was the last time you tried something New?
When I tried my hand at digital painting.
A life Lesson you learnt the hard way
Good judgement comes from experience; experience comes from bad judgement.
What gets you Excited about life?
Building new relationships.
What’s on top of your Bucket List?
F1 Monaco Grand Prix.
One thing you would most like to Change about the world
Efforts towards ocean conservation.
An activity that keeps you Motivated/Charged during tough times
Travelling.
What lifts your Spirits when life gets you down?
Travel vlogging.
Your go-to Stress Buster
SimCity’s badminton.
If you could give one piece of Advice to your younger self, what would it be?
There is a place in this world for everyone.
MAM
Smytten appoints Shishir Varma as CEO of Pulseai Research
Rebranded AI platform scales with 150 plus clients and 30 million users.
MUMBAI: In a world obsessed with what consumers say, Smytten is betting on what they actually do. The company has appointed Shishir Varma as chief executive officer of Pulseai Research, signalling a sharper push into AI-led, behaviour-driven consumer insights. The move comes as Smytten rebrands its insights vertical from Smytten PulseAI to Pulseai Research, marking a shift away from traditional, project-based research towards a more continuous, intelligence-led model.
Varma brings over 30 years of global experience across APAC markets, including India, China and Japan. Most recently managing director, Insights at Kantar Japan, he has built and scaled consumer insight businesses across geographies, including playing a key role in establishing Millward Brown in India. His mandate now: turn Pulseai into a category-defining platform in a space still dominated by surveys and static reports.
The pitch is straightforward but ambitious. Instead of relying on claimed responses, Pulseai Research taps into observed behaviour leveraging Smytten’s ecosystem of 30 million users built over a decade of product discovery, trials and purchases. The idea is to close the long-standing gap between what consumers claim and how they actually behave.
The numbers suggest early traction. In under 18 months, the platform has onboarded over 150 enterprise clients across sectors, pointing to growing demand for faster, more reliable alternatives to legacy research models.
Under the hood, the platform blends behavioural data with AI and large language model-led analysis to deliver real-time sentiment tracking, scalable qualitative insights, faster quantitative studies and always-on brand intelligence. In practical terms, that means compressing research timelines from weeks to days without sacrificing depth.
The ambition extends beyond FMCG. Pulseai Research is positioning itself as a cross-category intelligence layer, spanning auto, education, gadgets and emerging consumer segments anywhere behaviour-rich data can sharpen decision-making.
For Smytten, the leadership hire is less about optics and more about direction. With Varma at the helm, the company is leaning into a simple but powerful premise: in the age of AI, insight isn’t just about asking better questions, it’s about watching more closely.
