After years of dominating Silicon Valley boardrooms, Indian tech entrepreneurs are now shifting their focus back home, aiming to disrupt global markets with innovative businesses. Experts believe the next major disruption could come from India’s AI sector, with Reliance Jio, the country’s largest telecom company, leading the charge. Under the leadership of tycoon Mukesh Ambani, Reliance Jio has unveiled a range of AI offerings that could pose significant competition to established industry leaders.
Mukesh Ambani, chairman of Reliance, recently stated that the company is undergoing a transformation into a deep tech entity, describing AI as a transformative milestone in human evolution. He emphasized that Reliance’s tech-driven evolution would propel the company into a new phase of rapid growth, significantly increasing its value over the coming years. Reliance Jio has already made waves in India’s telecommunications, OTT, and various other sectors with its competitively priced services. However, in the AI domain, success may hinge on more than just aggressive pricing. Industry experts suggest that the timing and execution of Jio’s AI vision will be crucial to its success.
One of Reliance Jio’s most notable offerings is 100GB of free cloud storage, a move that could challenge the dominance of Google One and Apple’s iCloud among Android and Apple users in India—a feat that services like Dropbox and Microsoft’s OneDrive have yet to achieve. This competition could potentially push existing players to reconsider their pricing, with Google One currently offering 100GB at ₹130 and iCloud offering 50GB at ₹75.
“Jio has introduced an enticing proposition for the average phone user in India, who often struggles with paid storage upgrades,” said Neil Shah, founding partner of technology consulting firm Counterpoint Research. “However, the challenge lies in integrating these services with existing OS ecosystems.” For example, the majority of app data, including WhatsApp, is currently backed up in iCloud and Google One due to the dominance of Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS in the Indian market. For Jio to succeed, it will need to secure partnerships with app providers to decouple these services from the established ecosystems.
Beyond data storage, Jio’s strategy also focuses on using Jio Cloud to collect vast amounts of user data—an essential resource for training the company’s AI models.
