Corner Office Conversation

In a candid, unscripted exchange, India’s pharma titans peeled back the mythology of overnight success to reveal a harder truth: conviction compounded over decades. What began as two products and a bet on neglected therapy areas evolved into a multibillion-dollar enterprise riding India’s epidemiological shift. Innovation, they argued, is a long game—scarred by failed trials, investor backlash, and capital drought...

In a market long dominated by premium playbooks, Director of Reliance Consumer Products, T Krishnakumar is scripting a different FMCG story. Handpicked by Mukesh Ambani to build Reliance Consumer Products from scratch, he talks to host Ratna Bhushan about his strategy: targeting India's 500–600 million middle-class consumers, Krishnakumar is betting big on affordability at scale—a counterintuitive move in an inflationar...

India's AI revolution demands strategic vision beyond enthusiasm. Host Anirban Chowdhury talks to Rajan Anand, Managing Director of Peak XV and Surge a former Microsoft India head and Google VP shaping India's venture landscape. With 120 unicorns and 300 IPOs last year, India is poised for transformation. Anand's thesis: India needs localized, hyper-affordable AI models—not trillion-parameter ones. Predicting fifty AI unicorn...

Qure.ai is transforming routine medical imaging into early disease detection at unprecedented scale. Processing nearly 1,000 patients per hour across 105 countries, the startup has made preliminary radiology reports at India’s AIIMS and CMC Vellore AI-powered often flagging diseases physicians weren’t even looking for. In this conversation, Vikas Dandekar speaks with Prashant Warier Co-founder & CEO, Ankit Modi, Fou...

Suzlon Energy controls a third of India's wind market, but co-founder and vice chairman Girish Tanti isn't celebrating. In this conversation with host Anirban Chowdhury, he confronts hard questions: Why has India tapped only 4% of its wind potential despite three decades of operations? Can the sector scale from 6 gigawatts annually to the 10+ needed to meet 2030 targets? And will promised AI data centers overwhelm renewable capacit...

Global trade is entering a more complicated phase. It is no longer outpacing global GDP, and the ideas that once drove seamless globalization are increasingly under pressure. In this episode, host Anirban Chowdhury speaks with Tobias Meyer, CEO of DHL Group, to cut through the rhetoric around “deglobalization” and focus on what is actually happening to trade flows and supply chains. Rather than collapsing, supply chains...

As the global pharmaceutical industry enters a period of profound transition, this episode of Corner Office Conversation examines what lies ahead. Hosts Vikas Dandekar and Teena Thacker talk to Stefan Oelrich, Head of the Pharmaceuticals Division at Bayer AG, about the forces reshaping drug discovery and access from trade tensions and shifting innovation hubs to the promise and uncertainty of cell and gene therapies. Oelrich reflec...

Bourbon is having a moment and Sazerac wants India to be its next big frontier. In this episode, of the Corner Office Conversation ET’s Ratna Bhushan talks to Diego Bianchi, VP,Global Hubs at Sazerac, who takes us inside Kentucky’s historic Buffalo Trace Distillery to understand how the 200-year-old American spirits giant plans to grow in a market long ruled by Scotch. Bianchi breaks down the company’s India strat...

How will the rise of the agentic enterprise redefine the future of work, technology and scale for Indian businesses? Host Anirban Chowdhury speaks with Arun Kumar Parameswaran, Executive Vice President and MD of Salesforce, South Asia, about the shift from traditional digital transformation to a new era where autonomous AI agents collaborate with humans to reshape how organisations operate. From hyper-personalised experiences deliv...

India’s pharmaceutical industry is at an inflection point and in this episode, two of its young influential leaders break down where it’s headed next. In this episode of Corner Office Conversation host Vikas Dandekar talks to Nandini Piramal, Chairperson of Piramal Pharma, and Arjun Juneja, COO of Mankind Pharma for an unfiltered conversation on legacy, reinvention, and the race toward innovation. From Piramal’s b...

Apollo Hospitals’ 42-year journey is coterminous with the story of how India has been trying to modernise its healthcare. In this episode Host Vikas Dandekar talks to Dr. Preetha Reddy, Executive vice chairperson of Apollo Hospitals and Suneeta Reddy, MD, Apollo hospitals as they take us inside the institution: history, challenges and mission. From the time a young poor patient who was unable to afford treatment triggered the...

India’s real estate is at an inflection point. In this episode of Corner Office Conversation, hosts Anirban Chowdhury and Kailash Babar talk to Knight Frank’s Global Chairman William Beardmore-Gray and India Chairman and MD Shishir Baijal to unpack what’s behind record-high office demand, rising cross-border capital flows, and India’s shift into the world’s promising office markets. They discuss the su...

What happens when a small Indian software firm quietly evolves into a global SaaS powerhouse without external funding or data monetization? In this episode of Corner Office Conversation, ET’s tech experts and hosts Surabhi Agarwal and Suraksha P sit down with Zoho founder and chief scientist Sridhar Vembu and his leadership team to trace the company’s extraordinary rise from its humble beginnings in the 1990s to becomin...

India is YouTube’s fastest-growing market home to a young, ambitious generation that’s transforming from viewers into global creators. In this conversation, host Anirban Chowdhury talks to Gunjan Soni Country Managing Director of YouTube India to break down how the platform is powering this shift. She talks about the explosive rise of Shorts, the growing influence of connected TV, and how linguistic diversity and AI are...

Elizabeth Reid is one of Google’s most powerful women. She also has one of its most challenging jobs. At a time when AI is reshaping how people seek information, as standalone LLMs become their foremost information sources, friends and therapists, Reid, Head of Search, has to constantly grapple with the challenge that it’s no longer the only answer to all the world’s questions And yet, Google’s search clicks...

In this episode of Corner Office Conversation, we sit down with Sindhu Gangadharan, Managing Director of SAP Labs India and Chairperson of NASSCOM. From being the first woman to lead SAP Labs India to driving its AI-first transformation, Sindhu shares her journey, the bold decisions that shaped her career, and why India has become SAP’s biggest R&D hub outside Europe. Joined by Anirban Chowdhury and ET’s tech expert...

In this episode of Corner Office Conversations, host Ratna Bhushan sits down with Vipul Parekh, co-founder of BigBasket, to discuss how India’s leading online grocer is gearing up for the festive season amid the quick commerce boom. From IPO buzz and profitability challenges to category expansion beyond groceries, Parekh shares insights on competition with Swiggy, Zepto, JioMart, and Amazon, and BigBasket’s strategy aro...

Naveen Tewari thrives on pivots and preempting market demand before it becomes obvious to everyone else.
In this deep-dive with the founder and CEO of InMobi and Glance, host Anirban Chowdhury traces India’s earliest unicorn from its 2007 pivot from mKhoj (SMS search) to mobile advertising, SoftBank’s $200 million backing, and a “born-global” scale-up: InMobi today derives 65%–70% of revenue from No...

India’s pharma sector is at a turning point transitioning from a global generics powerhouse to a serious contender in biotech and innovation. In this episode, host Vikas Dandekar is joined by Namita Thapar, Executive Director, Emcure Pharmaceuticals, Aman Mehta, Managing Director, Torrent Pharma, and Sharvil Patel, Managing Director, Zydus Lifesciences to explore what it takes to climb the innovation ladder. From regulatory r...