Sajith Sivanandan appointed Tata Digital CEO & MD, to take over on Sept 1

Tata Digital, the ecommerce arm of Tata Sons, has appointed Sajith Sivanandan as the chief executive officer and managing director of the company. 

Sivanandan, who was the president of Jio Mobile Digital Services, will take over the role from September 1, 2025. The development was conveyed to employees in an internal email.

 

His appointment comes after Naveen Tahilyani stepped down from the role in May this year.

 

 At Tata Digital, Sivanandan’s work is cut-out. He will have to gear up the company to better compete with ecommerce players like Amazon and Flipkart as well as quick commerce players Zepto, Blinkit and Instamart. More importantly, he will have to boost the morale of the company, which has had no leadership since Tahilyani stepped down.

 

To manage this vacuum, N Chandrasekaran, chairman of Tata Sons, had constituted a management council comprising of six senior executives, who will report to the Board on a weekly basis.

 

“The management council, with inputs and guidance from the Board, will run Tata Digital until the new CEO is appointed,” read the email written by Chandrasekaran to the employees of Tata Digital, which Business Standard had reviewed.

 

The management council consists of Hardeep Guru, chief financial officer; Gaurav Hazrati, chief business officer - Financial Services; Satyam Mehra, chief strategy officer; Seshadri Narasimhan, chief business officer; Abhimanyu Lal, chief marketing officer; and Vinay Vaidya, chief technology officer.

 

In previous roles, Sivanandan, before joining Jio, was the CEO of Disney+ Hotstar. He has also served as the managing director and business head of Google Pay and Next Billion User initiative for the APAC region.

 

He has over 30 years of experience across India and APAC in technology, media, telecom, payments and consulting.