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During a fireside chat with Dream11 CEO Harsh Jain at the Mumbai Tech Week, he said the country has come a long way, from being considered something of a ‘technological laggard’ to being at the forefront of innovation
Akash Ambani also credited his family with teaching him about work-life balance. (Pic/PTI)
Akash Ambani, chairman of Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited (RJIL), has called artificial intelligence (AI) the biggest technology change of this generation while speaking at the Mumbai Tech Week on Friday.
“I think AI is the biggest technology change that we have seen in our lifetime till date. And in my view, it is the engine that will empower India to grow at 10 per cent or double-digit growth numbers for the foreseeable future,” he said.
During a fireside chat with Dream11 CEO Harsh Jain, he 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 that can adopt technology and use technology for the benefit of the country,” he said. “We’ve already showcased to the world—in connectivity—that we can be the leaders of technology, not just be fast followers.”
This 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, Akash Ambani said.
“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.
He said that building world-class AI infrastructure is necessary for India’s digital transformation.
“At Jio, we are already doing that. We recently announced in Jamnagar that we’re building our AI data centre, which will be a gigawatt capacity data centre, but continuing to invest at the infrastructure level,” he said.
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,” he said.
Ambani further said that Jio has assembled a full-stack AI team of over 1,000 data scientists, researchers, and engineers.
“We at Jio are already embracing it… We continue to invest in deep research and deep development that comes from that research,” he said.
Ambani also said that 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 said. “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.”
Akash Ambani said AI can help India address challenges in education, agriculture, healthcare, etc. 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.
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,” he said.
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, he 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 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.