Ambani’s Reliance Industries Strengthens India in Global AI Race

ANDAsia’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, addressed his shareholders at his highly anticipated annual address last Thursday and also unveiled “JioBrain,” a set of artificial intelligence (AI) tools and applications that he says will transform a range of businesses in the energy, textiles, telecom and other sectors that make up his multinational conglomerate Reliance Industries. “By enhancing JioBrain at Reliance, we will create a powerful AI services platform that we can offer to other businesses as well,” Ambani said in his speech.

The Reliance CEO’s latest offer comes as India is emerging as a key player in the global AI ecosystem, boasting a massive $250 billion IT industry that supports many of the world’s banks, manufacturers and companies. As the world’s most populous country, India also has a robust workforce of nearly 5 million developers at a time when AI talent is in short supply globally, with analysts predicting that AI services in India could be worth $17 billion by 2027, according to a recent report by Nasscom and BCG.

Puneet Chandok, president of Microsoft India & South Asia, points to research showing that India has one of the highest AI adoption rates among knowledge workers, with 92% using generative AI at work — significantly higher than the global average of 75%. “These findings underscore the significant impact of AI on the Indian workforce and the proactive steps being taken by both employees and leaders to integrate AI into their daily activities,” says Chandok, adding that the company is also supporting initiatives to equip 2 million people with AI skills by 2025.

The attention on India comes at a time when many countries around the world are looking to develop their own competitive AI systems rather than turning to the US or China. Over the past few years, the Indian government has created an ecosystem where global players like Google and Meta, Indian companies like Reliance Jio and Tata Consulting Services, and homegrown startups can benefit from its cost-effective technology landscape.

India’s ‘bottom-up’ approach to AI

India also aspires to have what Rajeev Chandrasekhar, India’s former minister of electronics and information technology, calls “sovereign AI” by integrating large-scale models into sectors like healthcare, agriculture and governance to drive economic growth. In March, the government increased investment of $1.25 billion in an ambitious “IndiaAI Mission” that will help develop computing infrastructure, startups and the use of AI applications in the public sector.

“Interestingly, the government itself is a major driver of AI transformation in India,” says Jibu Elias, a leading AI researcher and ethicist who helped found IndiaAI. Elias says the push has accelerated since 2020. “We want India to be like a global garage for AI tools, especially for the Global South.”

“The idea is that if we can create tools that address decades-old socio-economic challenges in India, they can be adopted globally,” he continues.

It’s an approach that Arvind Gupta, head of the Digital India Foundation in New Delhi, calls a “bottom-up” approach: “Unlike the Googles and Microsofts of the world, India has taken it to the next level by building trust in technology through digital public infrastructure,” he says. Digital public infrastructure, also known as DPI, is a public-private partnership that the government launched almost a decade ago by combining technology, governance and civil society. It includes a biometric identification system, fast payment systems and consent-based data sharing, which now gives India’s 1.4 billion citizens access to public services.

Gupta says DPI is playing a key role in giving India an edge in the global AI race. With 900 million Indians connected to the internet, he points to India as the “data capital of the world” that has “jumped into the whole AI culture.” That’s because most of that data is in public datasets that companies can use to write their own AI algorithms. “You don’t see that anywhere else in the world,” Gupta says.

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With so much publicly available data, many Indian startups are now racing to build their own large language models, or LLMs, that use generative AI to learn from massive amounts of data. And in a country where people speak more than a dozen languages, “India’s diverse and multilingual environment makes it an ideal test bed for developing and refining global AI solutions,” says Microsoft’s Chandok.

In January, Krutrim, an AI startup founded by entrepreneur Bhavish Aggarwal whose name translates to “artificial” in Sanskrit, became India’s first unicorn when it raised $50 million in funding from prominent Silicon Valley investors like Lightspeed Venture Partners and billionaire Vinod Khosla. Similarly, Bengaluru-based startup Sarvam recently launched a voice-enabled AI bot that supports over 10 Indian languages ​​using open-source software after raising $41 million. The government is also complementing this innovation by building “targeted LLMs” that can perform real-time language translation for citizens accessing public services, Gupta adds.

Still, India’s AI efforts can’t accelerate without compute power and shared resources. To address that gap, the Indian government last month finalized the purchase of 1,000 graphics processing units, or GPUs, to offer computing power to AI makers. In September last year, chipmaker Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang visited India to meet with Modi and CTOs, setting the company’s sights on the country as a potential location for chip production as the United States increasingly clamps down on high-end chip exports from China. “You’ve got data, you’ve got talent,” Huang told Modi at the time. “This is going to be one of the largest AI markets in the world.” In March this year, the first batch of Nvidia chips arrived in Indian data centers after the company partnered with Indian cloud services company Yotta to power its Shakti Cloud as India’s fastest AI supercomputing infrastructure.

Against this backdrop, billionaire-owned Indian companies are not left behind. In July, India’s largest software company, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), invested a massive $1.5 billion in a generative AI project. Gautam Adani, Asia’s second-richest person, announced a joint venture with the UAE in December to explore AI and diversify into digital services.

And as for Ambani, who has urged his employees to accelerate AI transformation across the board this year, the goal is clear: “We must be at the forefront of leveraging data, using AI as an enabler to achieve leaps in productivity and efficiency,” the billionaire told Reliance employees.

Since then, Jio, Reliance’s telecommunications arm, has partnered with the Indian Institute of Technology to launch “Bharat GPT,” a ChatGPT-style service for Indian users. A video shown at Reliance’s event showed how the speech-to-text tool would work if successful: a motorcycle mechanic talking to an AI bot in his native Tamil, a banker using the tool in Hindi, and a programmer in Hyderabad writing computer code in Telegu.

“It’s like an Indian family,” said Ganesh Ramakrishnan, chairman of IIT Bombay’s computer science and engineering department. “We are interdependent, and together we do better.”