Redseer Strategy Consultants

AI is not just reshaping who companies hire. It is reshaping the space they hire them into. Our Associate Partner Chhavi Singh spoke to ETHRWorld about our flexible workspaces report, discussing how AI-led teams - leaner, more specialised, and harder to forecast, are pushing enterprises toward "core plus flex" workplace models. The full report is linked in the comments 👇

A small celebration for the people behind the late nights, last-minute pivots, impossible asks, and the work that somehow always got done.   At our annual offsite, we took a moment to recognise the teammates who made this year sharper, lighter, and far more memorable. ❤️ Anil Kumar Madhuri Rajath Kashyap Kabra Samarth Pandya Kamar Chehimy Surya Pratap Singh Bhaskar Kumar Aditya Krishnan Nair K Shanmukh Sai Harshit M. Saksham Sethi Suraj Pant Guneesha Khanna Harshita Yadav Bhuvan Chandra K Muneera Arora Soumya Ghosh Chinmayee Patil Ranadeep Dutta Madhav Gulati Aditya Mor Ankit Yadav Ruhani Taneja Artham Khetan Anjali Modi Gottumukkala L K Raghavendra Varma Chirine Thamine Harshit Pandey Abhishek Tandon Abhishek Kumar Chinmayi Lanka Manoj Romina Dikshant Gaur Bilal Naqvi Shruti Srivastava Bhavesh Keshwani Nagendra Mopada Pranjal Gujral [Image Description: The slides celebrate Redseer's team members recognised at the company's annual offsite with individual and project-team winners pictured receiving their certificates]

Markets do not wait for certainty anymore. Market behaviour shifts overnight. Entire categories are rewritten in quarters. AI compresses cycles faster than organisations can react. In moments like these, strategy cannot be theoretical. It has to move at market speed. At Redseer, we were built for high-stakes work: • Helping founders through disruptive markets • Guiding investors through right investment decision-making • Enabling leaders to act before consensus forms Redseer - Guiding critical decisions in disruptive markets. #RedseerConsulting

For two decades, digital advertising consolidated around closed ecosystems (aka, walled gardens) controlling attention, identity, and transaction signals.  AI may partially reverse that trend. As demand shifts toward conversational AI, agentic commerce, and AI-native apps, discovery is fragmenting beyond traditional search and social platforms.  But discovery alone is not enough. Monetisation still depends on infrastructure: measurement, attribution, advertiser demand, publisher inventory, and identity resolution. That is why scaled open advertising ecosystems may benefit from the AI transition rather than lose relevance.   In this week’s “What’s Your Sense”, we unpack:  • Why conversational AI changes where demand gets created  • Why AI-native platforms are likely to partner with open ecosystems  • How programmatic infrastructure becomes more important in the AI era  • Why India is increasingly becoming the engineering backbone of the global AI-AdTech stack Get inside the future of AdTech.

India is #2 globally in concentrating AI talent. India's AI talent concentration grew 2.20x between 2019-2025, second only to UAE (2.21x). The catch is that UAE's entire workforce is much smaller than India, which hit a similar number on a base 50x larger. And this has a major second-order consequence on India's real estate market. AI was supposed to make work more remote, more async, more solo. The data says the opposite. 93% of Indian firms report their teams are more collaborative than a year ago. 0% report less. Meeting room demand is up 30-50%. AI teams spend their time validating, aligning, and exception-handling what the models produce. By 2030, the picture across India looks like this: 1. ~79 Mn sqft of incremental knowledge-economy office demand led by the AI wave. 2. GCCs alone will drive ~55 Mn sqft of leasing, close to half of all office leasing in India. 3. AI-led roles will drive ~31% of all flex workspace demand, up from 7% in 2026. When a country becomes the world's AI execution layer, it doesn't just need engineers. It needs square footage. Learn more in our report → https://lnkd.in/gWkhWasb Want to go further on AI talent and India's workspace demand? Reach out to Chhavi Singh & Chinmayi Lanka [Image Description: The image ranks the countries concentrating AI talent the fastest, charting AI talent concentration growth between 2019 and 2025 across UAE, India, Saudi Arabia, Cyprus and Portugal, with India placing second only to the UAE as per May 2026.]

Is Quick Commerce growing the market or just redistributing it?  Turns out, it's doing both at once.    On one side, it's created demand that barely existed before. When shoppers get the option to have alcohol mixers, health-focused snacks, or last-minute beauty and jewellery gifts in 10 minutes, they start buying things they'd never have planned a trip for. These are genuinely new occasions, and Quick Commerce owns most of them. On the other side, it's quietly redrawing where existing spend goes. The same ultra-convenience that creates new demand is also pulling baskets away from adjacent channels like slotted e-commerce and convenience stores, as consumers consolidate around the fastest option. And the scale makes the shift hard to ignore.  Quick Commerce already accounts for around half of India's online grocery spends, and that's expected to reach two-thirds of the market by 2030.  So, the "expand or redistribute" debate misses the point. It's not one or the other; it's new demand on one side and channel shift on the other, happening at once. Watch the entire discussion here: https://lnkd.in/gdkM3FBC   For more such insights reach out to Chhavi Singh, Kushal Bhatnagar and Nikhil Dalal   [Video description: The video shows the breakdown of how India’s grocery market is evolving across Kiranas and Quick Commerce, and hypermarkets, highlighting how quick commerce has created new use cases while benefitting from channel redistribution]

A leading Indian digital broking platform, despite serving millions of retail investors and growing fast, needed an honest, user-lens read on how its app actually performed against its closest competitors.   Knowing where to defend, fix, or invest next was the edge they wanted to build. That's where we partnered to run a primary study with retail investors across metros, Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities to benchmark the product experience feature-by-feature, decode what truly drives platform selection, and map how users move across competing apps. The result was a clear view of defendable strengths, gaps to close, and retention risks - translated into a sharper product and lifecycle roadmap.   Here's a quick glimpse into this engagement, led by Jasbir S. Juneja, Amitabh Kumar   [Image description: Six slides outlining how a leading Indian digital broking platform partnered with Redseer to benchmark its product experience against competitors and identify where to defend, fix, and grow.]

Most technology shifts in advertising added a layer. AI is rewriting every layer at the same time.   That is the shift our Associate Partner Mukesh Kumar spoke to Fortune India about, and the question our new report sets out to answer: as AI reshapes the ~$1 trillion advertising value chain, who wins the re-write?   India sits at the centre of it, no longer just servicing global AdTech but building and owning what comes next.   Download the report here:https://lnkd.in/gQce_632

The Chocolates aisle is moving to Quick Commerce    Chocolate has never been a planned purchase. It is bought on craving, on occasion, on the way to someone's home. The trigger is immediate, and for fifty years, the only channel close enough to that trigger was the offline shelf.     Every online channel that tried to crack the chocolate hit the same wall. By the time the order arrived, the craving had passed. The category stayed offline because the internet could not match its clock.     Ten-minute delivery changed that equation.   • India's online chocolate market grew 75% YoY in JFM'26, from ~₹580Cr to ~₹1010 Cr    • Quick Commerce alone grew 101%, taking its share from 67% to 77%    • Marketplaces and E-Grocery both lost share over the same period    • The ₹101-200 bucket is the volume engine on QC: 45% of GMV, growing 97%    • But ₹201+ price tiers grew faster still, between 106% and 125%, signalling that premium chocolate has migrated to QC alongside mass     The same rupee value behaves differently on different channels. On marketplaces, higher-priced chocolates are bundled packs and bulk formats: planned, basket-led buying. On QC, the same is now a single-serve premium, gifting SKUs, occasion-led indulgence. The price point is identical. The consumer behaviour is not.     For chocolate brand owners. The QC playbook is not the marketplace playbook scaled down. SKU architecture, pack sizes and trade marketing all need rebuilding around impulse and occasion, not provisioning. Brands still optimizing for modern trade are running on legacy distribution muscle the data says, is decelerating.     For Quick Commerce platforms. Chocolate is no longer a basket-filler only. It is a high-velocity, occasion-rich category compounding at triple digits. The next fight is not delivery speed (now table stakes) but merchandising at the moment of craving.     For investors and category strategists. Any chocolate bet without a serious QC thesis is currently mis-priced. Premium chocolate has already migrated online; just not to the channels most decks still model around.     Which other impulse-led categories are next to make this jump?     Unlock growth with the Benchmarks platform. Book a demo today: https://lnkd.in/gqzGyTbV   Nikhil Dalal | Saurav Chachan | Suveer S Nalkund |  

Everyone expects AI to blow up the US$1 trillion advertising market and crown a new set of winners. The data points the other way. AI does not move the advantage around the value chain. It stacks it higher for whoever already had the data and the reach. The newcomers built to go around the old players are quietly becoming their biggest customers. When OpenAI wanted to monetise ChatGPT in March 2026, it did not build an ad business; it plugged into an established open-web player and went live in weeks. In this week's "What's Your Sense", we unpack why AI is more likely to consolidate advertising than disrupt it, which players pull ahead and which get squeezed, and the one risk that could undercut the whole pattern. Read the full memo in the newsletter.