iWorld
ZEE5 partners with quaero to Orchestrate its complex customer data
MUMBAI: ZEE5, India’s fastest growing ConTech brand today announced its partnership with Quaero, an Enterprise Customer Data Platform provider, to power its big data capabilities and mine customer insights.
Having tipped over the 80 million subscribers base this year, ZEE5 realized that data operations complexity is already a reality. This highlights the need for a strong and robust data lake- data mart architecture. The partnership with Quaero enables ZEE5 with seamless data flow from sources, build unified customer view, automate data operations on cloud and a create a two-way connector to all current and future ZEE5 partners. With unique and differentiated access, the expected benefactors of this platform at ZEE5 are the IT, Data Science and Analytics, and Marketing teams. ZEE5 and Quaero foresee the partnership to go over and beyond the current challenges and look at ways to productize data-as-a-product for the media industry.
Ujjyaini Mitra, Head Data Scientist, ZEE5 India said, “This partnership with Quaero will add higher capabilities to our data science team within Zee5, enabling us access to various data streams through a single platform. This will enable granular level insights about our customers and bring down the time to action. Quaero has brought to the project, apart from its robust platform, skilled data scientists and data engineers with over 20 years of rich domain expertise in data and analytics to create a data lake that addresses some of the unique challenges faced by media companies. The Quaero CDP provides strong data governance along with Data Lineage, thereby making us a pioneer in the industry”.
Sandeep Prakash, APAC Business Head, Quaero said, “We launched our APAC operations in 2018 and are excited to have ZEE5 as a major client in the region. Our work for global media brands like Disney and ESPN has enabled us to deliver a cutting-edge data lake solution which is scalable, easy to use, quick, agile & tailored specifically for the media and entertainment industry.”
ZEE5 hosts over 100,000+ hours of content across genres in over 12 languages, thus making it a complex data landscape in terms of volume, velocity and variety. At ZEE5, acquisition of data has never been a concern, but it is accessibility of data in useable form to mine insights, which assumes critical importance considering the impact it can have on the overall business. Thus, the need for a unified customer view by ingesting multiple disparate 1st, 2nd & 3rd party data sources is more important than ever before. Real time insightful data empowers ZEE5 to optimize pricing models and achieve higher audience retention.
Quaero, a new breed data and analytics platform is roped in for building the data stack that can ingest, store and segment these structured and unstructured data. This will provide ZEE5 with a horizontally and vertically scalable data lake and a more powerful and readily usable data mart. The various sources of data contributing to the unified view include clickstream data, product usage data, mobile behavior data, content data (CMS), video consumption data, social data, campaign performance data, ad inventory & performance data and many such. The platform also will act as the backbone of data infrastructure and computation engine for powering ZEE5's dashboards & visualizations.
The platform is expected to deliver Golden Customer Record with a 360-degree view of every customer, enabling smarter, personalized and timely marketing of all content on ZEE5 platform.
Some of the early benefits of embedding Quaero's platform at the core of ZEE5's data stack include better and relevant ad placements, richer experience for paid subscribers, personalization at scale, tailored content production and better revenue conversion & tracking.
The future roadmap for the project also includes new and contemporary data sources, extending it beyond 1st party data to external sources, 2-way connections to downstream marketing applications and creating new products out of the richer data being mined.
iWorld
Meta plans 8,000 layoffs in new AI-led restructuring wave
First phase from May 20 may cut 10 per cent workforce amid AI pivot.
MUMBAI: At Meta, the future may be artificial but the cuts are very real. The social media giant is reportedly preparing a fresh round of layoffs, with an initial wave expected to impact around 8,000 employees as it doubles down on its artificial intelligence ambitions. According to a Reuters report, the first phase of job cuts is slated to begin on May 20, targeting roughly 10 per cent of Meta’s global workforce. With nearly 79,000 employees on its rolls as of December 31, the move marks one of the company’s most significant workforce reductions in recent years.
And this may only be the beginning. Sources indicate that additional layoffs are being planned for the second half of the year, although the scale and timing remain fluid, likely to be shaped by how Meta’s AI capabilities evolve in the coming months. Earlier reports had suggested that total cuts in 2026 could reach 20 per cent or more of its workforce.
The restructuring comes as chief executive Mark Zuckerberg continues to steer the company towards an AI-first operating model, committing hundreds of billions of dollars to the transition. Internally, this shift is already visible: teams within Reality Labs have been reorganised, engineers have been moved into a newly formed Applied AI unit, and a Meta Small Business division has been created to align with broader structural changes.
The trend is hardly isolated. Across the tech sector, companies are trimming headcount while investing aggressively in automation. Amazon, for instance, has reportedly cut around 30,000 corporate roles nearly 10 per cent of its white-collar workforce citing efficiency gains driven by AI. Data from Layoffs.fyi shows over 73,000 tech employees have already lost jobs this year, compared with 153,000 in all of 2024.
For Meta, the move echoes its earlier “year of efficiency” in 2022–23, when about 21,000 roles were eliminated amid slowing growth and market pressures. This time, however, the backdrop is different. The company is financially stronger, generating over $200 billion in revenue and $60 billion in profit last year, with shares up 3.68 per cent year-to-date though still below last summer’s peak.
That contrast underlines the shift underway. These layoffs are less about survival and more about reinvention. As Meta restructures itself around AI from autonomous coding agents to advanced machine learning systems, the question is no longer whether the company will change, but how many roles will be left unchanged when it does.
