Tanuj Luthra and the weeks before the sale

A person comparing two cars is doing something commercially inconvenient: thinking. There may be a budget to settle, a feature to understand, a second opinion to seek. The comparison can end with another comparison. To the person making it, that is perfectly reasonable. To a business waiting for a sale, it can feel like a very long afternoon.

Tanuj Luthra has put a useful time scale on that interval. Speaking in an industry roundtable covered in April 2026, CarDekho Group’s Chief Business Officer said, “In automotive, the journey can stretch over weeks.” His point concerned the use of AI to understand where a potential buyer stands in the process, so that communication fits the decision being made.

Weeks are an interesting unit for a revenue executive to choose. They leave room for hesitation. They recognise that someone can be paying attention without being ready to pay. For Luthra, whose career includes television, digital media and automotive technology, this is a meeting point between two familiar parties: a business hoping to be chosen and an audience with its own agenda.

The weeks before a yes

Consider the distinction between exploring a car and evaluating it. These are ordinary words, but they imply different questions. Exploration might begin with possibilities; evaluation asks whether a particular possibility will work. A message suited to one moment can arrive awkwardly in another. The sales pitch has put on its dinner jacket while the customer is still checking the invitation.

Luthra’s roundtable contribution is useful because it starts with that progression. He described AI as a way of understanding whether a user is comparing, evaluating or exploring. Read together, those stages suggest a practical challenge: respond to the person’s present question. That is an interpretation of his comments, rather than a claim that every visit can be classified neatly.

It also gives his career a coherent thread. Revenue work depends on understanding why an audience is there. At CarDekho, that audience can arrive with a purchase in mind, a question about a model, or a desire to compare. The commercial opportunity sits beside the usefulness of the information. Keeping those interests compatible is a substantial part of the business puzzle.

“the journey can stretch over weeks”

Tanuj Luthra · April 2026

An engineer learns the language of markets

Luthra’s education began in a different vocabulary. He studied computer science engineering at Maharshi Dayanand University between 1999 and 2003. His postgraduate studies at the Institute of Management Technology, Ghaziabad, ran from 2004 to 2007 and covered marketing and finance. Later came a senior management programme at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, listed for 2021 to 2022.

That sequence puts several kinds of business knowledge in the same biography. Computer science concerns how systems work. Marketing asks how an offering finds its audience. Finance supplies the arithmetic that keeps a promising idea answerable to reality. The combination makes an interesting background for his current role, though a degree alone cannot explain the choices a person makes over a career.

His professional path included Star TV Network, The Walt Disney Company and Reliance Broadcast Network. At Star, one of his roles was northern cluster leadership covering Star Plus, Star Plus HD, Utsav and Hotstar. That mix placed broadcast names and a digital service within the same commercial frame. His career subsequently took him to revenue leadership at Network18.

The progression is easier to understand as a movement through settings for attention than as a collection of logos. A channel, a digital service and an automotive platform give a visitor different reasons to show up. For the commercial teams around them, the recurring question is how to make that presence valuable to a client while preserving the audience’s reason for coming.

A different audience, a familiar question

Luthra joined CarDekho in January 2023 as Vice President of New Auto. He became Chief Business Officer in April 2025. The elevation was covered publicly that July, by which time his first two years at the company had become the opening chapter of a broader responsibility. His response to the coverage was brief and upbeat: “The best is yet to come”.

There is a temptation in business profiles to treat a promotion as the moment everything becomes inevitable. Real careers deserve a less tidy reading. These dates show a change of employer and then a change of scope. They establish the sequence. The interest lies in the commercial problems waiting on either side of those changes.

CarDekho’s public offering helps explain the setting. Its website and app provide vehicle specifications, prices, comparisons, reviews, videos and pictures. It also connects with manufacturers, dealers and financial institutions. Alongside the consumer service are tools for businesses, including lead management and sales performance support. Someone researching a vehicle encounters the visible pages; a separate set of working processes sits behind them.

For an executive arriving from media, that arrangement creates a familiar relationship in a new context. There is an audience and there are organisations trying to reach it. But the audience’s purpose is more particular here. A car comparison is organised around a decision. Commercial communication has to make sense within that decision, with all the questions a substantial purchase can bring.

The work around the transaction

The responsibilities described at Luthra’s elevation included business strategy, revenue leadership and partnerships, with commercial activity spanning digital advertising, branded content, software services and white-label intellectual property. These are related activities with different jobs to do. A campaign can bring visibility. Content can provide room for explanation. Software can help an organisation manage the work that follows an enquiry.

That combination is worth pausing over. A platform’s commercial life can extend beyond selling space on a screen. The relationship with a partner may involve information, operational tools or a service offered under another brand. The practical question becomes what the partner needs to accomplish. The answer determines which offering belongs in the conversation.

It would be easy to draw these activities as a straight line ending at a purchase. The drawing would be satisfyingly clean and rather optimistic. Luthra’s own description of an automotive journey allows more time than that. The person exploring today may be comparing later. A commercially useful system has to accommodate the interval without treating every unfinished decision as a failure.

The colleague behind the title

Titles describe responsibility more efficiently than they describe a working day. Colleagues sometimes supply the smaller details. In a public recommendation, Sapna Jain recalls Luthra helping with an investment deal involving a person who had initially arrived with a general query. It is her recollection of working with him, and its charm lies in the unpromising beginning: someone asked a question.

Jain also describes enthusiasm and an ability to keep work from becoming excessively solemn while still delivering. Another recommender, Gunjan Nagpal, describes him as rational, warm and someone colleagues could turn to when challenges appeared. These are individual assessments. They give texture to a professional reputation without turning that reputation into a personality test.

There is a more recent glimpse in a colleague’s account of joining CarDekho. Manoj Tejwani publicly thanked Luthra, Sonam Banka, Jai Nagayach and the HR team for helping his transition and explaining workflows, tools and expectations. It is a modest example of leadership as it is experienced by another person: somebody makes the organisation easier to understand.

Set beside the career dates, these recollections bring the scale back down. A revenue role may be expressed through strategy and business objectives, but colleagues meet it through help, explanations and the atmosphere of a conversation. The public accounts suggest a working reputation that includes that human dimension. They are useful precisely because they describe encounters rather than abstract virtues.

Luthra’s current chapter places those encounters inside a business concerned with choices. Brands want attention. Partners want results. Visitors want to understand a vehicle well enough to decide. His public comments return to the time between interest and action. In that space, the next useful thing may be an explanation, a comparison or simply a message that arrives at the appropriate moment.

A finished sale is easy to count. The weeks preceding it are harder to describe. They are also where people do much of their deciding. Luthra’s route from media revenue to CarDekho gives that interval a professional biography: different screens, different questions, and a continuing need to understand the person on the other side.