Independent Mumbai agency AGENCY09 has marked its 13th anniversary with a broad set of leadership elevations, promoting long-serving team members into roles that span growth, brand and design, production, creative direction and AI, technology operations, paid media and search.
The agency framed the move as preparation for its next phase of growth, built around its internal positioning of “We Deliver Growth” and an offering that stitches together strategy, content, technology, design, data and media.
Who moves where
The newly elevated leaders will work alongside the existing management team — Founder and CEO Tushar Khakhar, Co-Founder and Head of Content Gautam Anand, Co-Founder and Head of Technology Bipeen Nadgauda, Head of Culture Archita Arekar, and Chief Strategy Officer Rajesh Patalia.
- Saheb Singh — Growth & Expansion, covering new business, strategic partnerships and integrated solutions.
- Rakesh Gawas — Brand & Design, focused on brand thinking, positioning and design systems.
- Chaitali Rajadhyaksha — Production, overseeing planning, craft and delivery across formats.
- Ketan Shivadekar — Creative Direction & AI Labs, driving creative direction plus AI-led ideas and workflows.
- Aniket Sakpal — Growth, Key Accounts, deepening existing client relationships.
- Shivani Khandelwal — Tech Operations, spanning technology projects, delivery and operational scale.
- Shivangi Kothari — Paid Media, with a focus on strategy, performance and optimisation.
- Aditya Jadhav — Tactical Design Projects.
- Yogendra Vishwakaarma — Strategic Collaborations & Projects, handling high-intensity work and key collaborations.
- Uma Chavan and Chandra Suthar — jointly leading Keyword & Organic Brand Discovery, covering organic growth, search performance, online brand image and discoverability across traditional and AI-led platforms.
Mayank Desai continues to lead Dubai Operations, including regional delivery, client relationships and business growth.
Commenting on the elevations, Khakhar said each elevated member had helped build and strengthen the agency over the years, and that the team shares a common vision to “deliver great work”.
Why this matters
Two details in the announcement are worth pausing on, because they say something about where mid-sized independent agencies in India are placing their bets.
First, an AI Labs mandate sitting inside creative. Rather than parking artificial intelligence in a separate innovation silo, AGENCY09 has attached it to creative direction. That is a structural signal: AI is being treated as a craft and workflow question, not a side project. Agencies that keep AI experiments away from the people making the work usually end up with demos rather than deliverables.
Second, search is being reframed as discovery. The “Keyword & Organic Brand Discovery” remit explicitly includes AI-led platforms alongside traditional search. As answer engines and chat assistants absorb a slice of query volume, brands are having to think about whether they are cited, summarised and recommended — not just ranked. Naming that as a leadership role, rather than folding it into a generic SEO brief, is a fairly forward-looking call.
The promote-from-within play
The other notable thing is that this is almost entirely an internal exercise. In a market where senior agency talent moves frequently, building a leadership bench from long-tenured staff has clear advantages: institutional memory, client continuity and lower onboarding friction.
The trade-off is narrower external perspective, which agencies usually offset with lateral senior hires in specialist areas. For marketers evaluating agency partners, the useful question is not whether leadership came from inside or outside, but whether the named leader actually owns outcomes.
What marketers can take away
If you are on the client side, structural announcements like this are a reasonable prompt to check three things about your own agency relationships:
- Is there a single named owner for each discipline you buy — creative, paid media, production, search?
- Does someone on the agency side own AI workflows, or is it being improvised project by project?
- Is organic discovery on anyone’s scorecard now that AI assistants influence brand consideration?
For agency-side readers, the template here is straightforward: define narrow, outcome-linked remits, keep AI close to the creative floor, and give retention-focused roles (like key accounts growth) the same status as new business.
Source: MediaNews4U
