Speaking at Mumbai Tech Week on Friday, Ambani said the country has come a long way, from being considered something of a “technological laggard” to being at the forefront of innovation.
“I think we have established that India is one of the forefront nations [sic] that can adopt technology and use technology for the benefit of the country,” Ambani said, “We’ve already showcased to the world — in connectivity — that we can be the leaders of technology, not just be fast followers.”
This, Ambani said, is best exemplified by the Unified Payments Interface which, since its launch in 2016, has now been exported to other countries, such as France, Singapore, the UAE, Sri Lanka, Mauritius, Bhutan, and Nepal.
“I think we need to start talking about India first. Innovations that we have done at world class standards. The fact today that we’re exporting our UPI solution to other countries speaks volumes,” he said.
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Ambani said AI is the most significant technological advancement in our lifetimes, predicting that it will drive India’s economic growth into double digits. The Jio Infocomm chairman said time is of the essence and that it is important to invest in infrastructure.
“The three fundamental blocks that we have to do to enable us in that AI leadership moment — continue to invest in AI infrastructure, AI data centres that are completely ready, that can scale worldwide, scale for India at millions and millions of users.”
In January, Reliance Industries announced a gigawatt-ready AI data centre in Jamnagar, Gujarat.
The Jamnagar factory could become the world’s largest data centre by capacity. The initiative seeks to tap into the increasing global demand for AI services by integrating NVIDIA’s state-of-the-art AI semiconductors and targeting a 3GW capacity. Once completed, this facility could outstrip the current largest data centres, which operate at capacities below one gigawatt.
Ambani further said Jio is walking the talk — the company has assembled a full-stack AI team of over 1,000 data scientists, researchers, and engineers.
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We at Jio are already embracing it … We continue to invest in deep research and deep development that comes from that research.”
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On mounting worries that AI will affect jobs, Ambani said the advent of any new technology will result in job displacement, but expressed confidence that humankind will persevere and adapt.
“I’m a firm believer that AI will transform jobs. Today we’ve seen AI take over our mundane tasks, our repetitive tasks.”
He likened the current AI revolution to the internet’s inception, which gave rise to numerous industries, including fintech. “When the Internet was created, new industries were born — fintech, e-commerce, a creator economy … The main thing is we’ve seen these shifts happening over time. We’ve seen how the internet can create these new industries, these new jobs, but we can prepare for it this time around — equip ourselves with the right tools … the right insights to excel our impact, excel our businesses.”
Ambani said AI can help India address challenges in education, agriculture, healthcare, at al. He said these problems can be solved only through collaboration between the government, private sector, and academia. He said Jio, which shook up the Indian telecom landscape with cost-effective data and voice plans, is prepared to lead the way on this front.
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The quickest way to embrace AI, Ambani said, is for companies to adopt the technology. “What we’re seeing right now is consumer-led AI … we have to embrace [company-led AI]. I’m totally a believer in the thought that companies will have to embrace AI or their future is very, very bleak, to be honest.”
The government has been far from idle on the AI front. This year, the Centre announced a budgetary allocation of ₹2,000 crore to the IndiaAI Mission, marking a near-300% increase from last year.
While a razor-sharp focus on developing or embracing AI is essential, Ambani said it will become mainstream only when we stop thinking about its impact in isolation — treat it as a deeptech problem, and not an AI-only problem to solve.
Citing the example of education, Ambani said five layers are essential for a deep tech company: connectivity, compute (data centre and edge), devices, content, and intelligence.
“So these five layers put together enable us to [solve] big problems like education. And … you cannot solve the education and the literacy problem only by technology. You have to work with institutions that have been created across India to have a teacher module, a student module, an administration module … [these] five layers … need to create an absolutely seamless customer experience … [or] it becomes very, very hard for us to solve larger issues like the literacy and education in India,” he said.
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