On Day 1 of the Mumbai Tech Week (MTW) 2025, Reliance Jio Chairman Akash Ambani, in a fireside chat with Dream11 Co-founder Harsh Jain, discussed the future of artificial intelligence in India. The two, among the most pressing topics, talked about the impact of AI on jobs. As Jain highlighted how India leapfrogged from 3G to world-class 5G and the work done by Jio in AI-driven smart homes, Ambani talked about Jio’s vision for Jio Brain. "At Jio, the company bears the responsibility of launching products that can scale to millions and millions of Indians, at giving the best customer experience and at a very affordable rate," says Ambani.

"Our latest example of Jio Hotstar is something like that. You'll see us building our platforms as we build out this infrastructure. GPU as a service is something that we can think about, and launch so that there's a bedrock that people can create on top of, like consumer applications. We have an application that we'll be shortly launching, which is a cloud PC, which is a complete PC in your cloud that is accessible in each of your homes, but be device agnostic," said Ambani.

He dismissed concerns that AI would lead to mass unemployment. “At the event of any new technology, this has always been a big kind of shift—that jobs are going to be taken away. I’m a firm believer that AI will transform jobs,” he said.

The Jio Chairman said every major technological shift had initially sparked fears of job losses, only to create entirely new industries. “When the Internet was created, new industries were born. Fintech was born, e-commerce was born, a creator economy was born. I’m firmly of the belief that AI will transform jobs and won’t replace jobs,” Ambani said.

Jio, he explained, is already integrating AI into its core operations. He said instead of cutting the workforce, the technology is shifting job roles. “Today we monitor our network that now covers about 95% of the living population of India. Before, we had to do it across systems. Today we can proactively monitor, and before even a customer has a bad experience, we can predict it,” he said.

Ambani said that AI adoption is no longer optional for companies. “What we're seeing right now is consumer-led AI, but second is company-led AI. I think we have to embrace that. Companies will have to embrace AI or their future is very bleak, to be modest."

Ambani said AI will play a crucial role in reshaping industries such as education, healthcare, and agriculture, and laid out a five-layer framework for deep tech-driven transformation, which includes connectivity, compute infrastructure, devices, content, and intelligence.