Fireside Chat with Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited (RJIL) Chairman Mr. Akash M Ambani

Harsh Jain And so let’s have another round of applause for the Chairman of Jio, Akash Ambani. So thanks Akash, for coming. You can see this room. It’s like, like I was joking this morning. It’s like a Mumbai local train. We have everyone here and everyone’s happy. Whether you’re standing, sitting, doesn’t matter. You’re just happy to be here and be part of this amazing moment where we are really getting Mumbai to shine on the tech ecosystem. So, you know, first I wanted to start by asking you that, you know, let me first start by telling you a small history about myself when I started Dream11 in Mumbai and every VC would come to me.

And this is with all our tech founders here we are, 65 unicorn silicon founders. They would come and say, yeah, you have to move to Bangalore. Why are you in Mumbai? How can you build a company in Mumbai? And they would say, you know, I would say Bangalore me kya hai? And they would say, Swiggy hai, Ola hai, Meesho hai, Flipkart hai, PhonePe hai, Cred hai. And I think you’re going to get where I’m going to. But I would say, mere paas Jio hai and that’s a mic drop moment. I’ll be like, bas ho gaya, end of discussion.

So thank you for creating the wonder that is Jio for our country. And one other thing I’d love to thank the family for is creating this.. look, look around you. Jio Convention center is really one of the best gifts they could give to the city. So thank you very much for that. Ofcourse, I have to. It’s coming. It’s coming. But you know, first I want to start by talking a little bit about the family and Isha, your twin, your better half of the twin side is here and you have Shloka who is the better half of your married life. And they’re both like way more intelligent than us. They’re definitely better looking than us. So you have all this amazing family support. Now you have two beautiful kids. I love them. Let’s  start with something soft and fun like how do you manage, you know, Jio, this amazing company and this work life balance between them.

Akash AmbaniFirstly, thank you very much for having me here. I don’t very often do public speaking and I’m grateful that Isha and Shloka have made all the trip here to give a little bit of confidence. So thank you to both of you for being here. I’m really happy to be here and supporting Mumbai Tech. As we all know that we want to be known as the Tech hub in the country. And if not only in the country, across the world. Coming to balance, you know, I’ve been very, very fortunate that I’ve grown up with a very close knit family as we were growing up. I mean, like Harsh mentioned, Isha and me, we came into this world together and since then we’ve become very, very close. As a family, we’ve always been there. So the first thing is about the values inside the family. And for us, the work was never looked at, the balancing part of life.

It was always something which was the biggest part of our life. Growing up, you know, we saw our parents, both my father and mother, you know, not only try to balance family and work, but make them both the biggest priorities of our life. And that’s something that I’ve continued to embody as we have now been working in Reliance for the last 10 years. So the question of balance really does not come of balancing family or work. Both are the biggest priorities of my life. And there’s one simple funda that I think we all need to embody which is, you know, your priorities of your life. And you know, as you grow older, your priorities change. But you want to make sure that your priorities are something that are very meaningful to make your life what you imagine it to be. And from our point of view, you know, my, my family and my work are the two biggest priorities of my life. Not only for this phase, but going forward also.

Harsh Jain

Yeah, that’s a great answer. Shlok, thumbs up. All right everybody, thumbs up from the wife. You know, talking about your dad, MDA, obviously. Mukesh Ambani for all of us is the inspiration for the whole country. Everyone looks up to him. You have a mom who actually runs larger companies than 99% of our business people in India. So you have this like super achieving family. How do you step into these shoes? These shoes are like very large shoes to fill. And how do you manage and what is your biggest inspiration?

Akash Ambani

You know, Harsh, biggest inspiration goes without doubt is the family that we’ve grown up with. We’ve all lived under one roof for now, 32 years of our lives. And the inspiration is not too far to find in both my parents. I, I deeply value the human beings that they are and the work that they do. But the inspiration really does not come from, you know, large items. Of course, the vision, the boldness, the ability to be very, very inspiring. It comes from the small things, you know, like for example, till date my father clears each and every email that is sent to him and he does it till 2am at night. And he’s working for the fourth decade of his working life. And that’s where the inspiration really comes from. My mom, very, very similarly, like we’ll be staring at the same thing. We share a joint passion for cricket and we’re watching the same TV. But the small little details that she notices is something that you can draw inspiration out of, and I think, out of and above everything, their dedication is the biggest inspiration for everyone around us who have grown up around them. And that’s really why we can say that the biggest inspirations because we can tell all of the small, nuanced things that make the difference. Working at 2am in the morning, clearing an email that is sent to him. And this year will be his 45th year working at Reliance is where you can find him.

Harsh Jain

That’s amazing. You know, and I’ve personally seen this work ethic growing up. I think we’ve had firsthand experience into just seeing and being inspired by people who, you know from work is actually their life and how they manage it. But at the same time raise a great family and spend quality time there. So I fully agree. Now, you know, you stepped into these big shoes. You’ve now taken on the role of Chairman of Jio. It’s literally the forefront of technology of India. Every single person here is thankful for finally getting us 5G Internet at the best speeds possible while we travel. I get like 150 Mbps in my car, on my phone, which is just phenomenal. How do you feel about this responsibility?

Akash Ambani

I’m gonna say something which is which I truly believe. Like, I think it’s a great honor to be Chairman. But I’ve never personally worked for titles and they don’t mean a lot to me personally in the sense when we were growing up, what we saw is a legacy being created. Started from my grandfather and extended by my father, my mother, now myself, Isha and Anant trying to continue to build that legacy. What is that legacy? That legacy is really beyond creating impact and creating impact for our country first, then for our company. That’s something that is something that we have to embody. Me and Isha, as we grew into these big shoes to fill, no doubt they’re big shoes to fill, but understanding that impact, creating that impact as we go oninto the future, try to create our own businesses, try to create our own impact on society for the good of society and the good for India, and then what happens to the company is next. So it’s not really the Title that you think you should feel the responsibility for. You should feel theresponsibility for creating that impact and actually helping millions and millions of Indians to thrive.

Harsh Jain

I think that’s a great answer. We all have to like focus on the impact we create. You know, we’re all very fortunate to be in a country where our domestic product itself can reach 800 million Indians thanks to Jio. And it’s a great time to be running a tech company and to have tech startups for all the entrepreneurs out there. So now let’s talk a bit about AI. You’re at the forefront of Jio, you’re leading it forward. But India is still seen as a laggard, right? We’re still seen as a laggard with tech. We’re always seen as like following, still following the west in terms of tech, in terms of AI. Is that true? How do we change this?

Akash Ambani

I feel the contrary Harsh.Today, eight years on from launching Jio, we’ve become the biggest data consuming nation around the world. We’ve led that every, every single hour, average consumption per user is now significantly higher than anywhere else in the world, including China. So I think gone are the

days that we should think about India from a tech laggard perspective. 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. In our estimation at Jio, 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% or double digit growth numbers for the foreseeable future. So we continue to what we have to really do to do it. I think there are three fundamental blocks that we have to do to enable us in that AI leadership movement. I think to continue to invest in AI infrastructure, AI data centers that are  completely ready, that can scale worldwide, scale for India at millions and millions of users. At Jio we are already doing that. We recently announced in Jamnagar that we’re building our AI data center which will be a gigawatt capacity data center but continuing to invest at the infrastructure level. The second and third thing actually go quite jointly is the research and development part of AI. And I think that now that we are very fortunate that Prime Minister Modi had laid out his, his vision about you know, powering this with the AI mission and all of that. We continue to invest on deep research and deep development come that comes from that research. And then finally I think the proof of the pudding is to invest in the right talent. Right? And what  does it really mean to invest in the right talent is get the best of class and foster those engineers coming back, data scientists coming back today at Jio, we’ve already invested in our overall full stack AI team, which is led by data scientists, researchers and engineers to be a thousand plus. The critical element in this, I feel is also to foster new ideas and push the boundaries of development..right. It’s not too far away where we will have a groundbreaking idea that will have half a billion people on one platform coming out of India. And I think that’s really what I think will take us to have that AI leadership. I think we’ve already showcased to the world in connectivity that we can be the leaders of technology, not just be fast followers. I mean, you mentioned it in your opening note that not too long ago, I mean, back to 2015, which is just 10 years ago, Internet speeds were less than 1 MB in this country, whether it be on the mobile or at the home. But today, everyone continues to enjoy very high data speeds. And so I think from an AI point of view is these three critical items that we need to focus on.

Harsh Jain
I think that’s very clear and I think everyone here will agree at least. You know, even when we used to go abroad, travel abroad, study abroad, we used to see all these foreign nations with like way faster Internet. And I may be giving a little bit of my age away, but, you know, when wewere growing up, we had that, you know, you used to literally dial in through a modem and 1 Mbps was like unbelievable speed. But then when we grew up and we saw speeds in America, we’d be like, what the hell? Why is our speed, you know, why is our Internet speed like this in India? And why is this like, apparently 3G giving me less than 1Mbps. And today I can say that when we travel, we laugh at the world. We literally were there and we are like, wait, you pay 60-70$ a month for crappy Internet? Boss, come to India, just try Jio for a while and then you’ll see

what we have. So thank you for that. It’s been an amazing thing to see all of India benefit from this. You know, you spoke about the public sector also and you spoke about jobs, you spoke about the thousands of engineers. First, let me ask you, a lot of people talk about AI and they say that it’s going to take jobs away. Do you think AI will get rid of a lot of jobs? Do you think we need to be worried about the amount of jobs that will have to be removed because AI will replace them.

Akash Ambani
I think 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. Today we’ve seen AI take over our mundane tasks, our repetitive tasks. I have Isha and Shloka here that have founded a new preschool in Bombay called Little Nest. I was on the joke, I was, I was telling them that whilst you’re listening to me, please do not start talking about Little Nest. Just listen to me. But the, the one thing that they have also been able to do is, you know, really create the value for the student because of the repetitive mundane jobs like, you know, scheduling has been taken over with AI and we see that as a definite, you know, shift. I mean if you just think about it, when the Internet was created, no industries were born. You know, fintech was born, e-commerce was born, a creator economy was born. Imagine even our generation, Harsh, you know, if you imagine that you can earn a full time living by just being a content creator on YouTube or Instagram, you know, you have not imagined it. So I’m firmly of
the belief that AI will transform jobs and won’t replace jobs. We at Jio are already embracing it. The main thing is we’ve seen these shifts happening over time, right? We’ve seen how Internet can create these new industries, these new jobs, but we can prepare for it this time around. And when I say we prepare for it is equip ourselves with the right tools, equip ourselves with the right insights to excel our impact, excel our businesses. At Jio, like a small example, today we monitor  our network that now covers about 95% of the living population of India. Before, before that, you know, we had to do it across systems. Today we can proactively monitor and before even a customer has a bad experience, experience, we can predict it. And this is just not, you know, something that is, this is again, instead of deeping/delving deep into the data, figuring out what the consumer does, the patterns are being picked up by ML engineers, AI engineers to kind of spend the time to actually solve the problem then finding out what the problem is. So that’s one way that we prepared.

Harsh Jain
For it at this is already happening. You know, we are significantly actually working on AI. It’s just that maybe we don’t talk about it as much, but there is like rapid deployment of AI systems already.

Akash Ambani
Of course, I, I think, you know, that goes without saying. Our quickest way is to embrace and use AI in the best possible use cases across companies. I think there will be one. What we’re seeing right now is consumer led AI, you know, and but second is company led AI and I think we have to embrace that rather than that. I’m totally a believer in the thought that companies will have to embrace AI or their future is very, very bleak to be modest. But that’s something that we must do on a daily basis. In fact, some of our daily reviews include the scope of work that we have to implement company wide to reimagine some of our company functions. We spoke about our operation centers, the customer care, sales, data analytics. All of that we have to embrace as we build our companies.

Harsh Jain
I think AI is to stay and you can live under a rock or like just hide away from it, but it’s going to transform because it’s a horizontal, it’s not a vertical. It’s going to touch every single part. And I think you guys are doing a phenomenal job to be in front of the curve. But you know, you spoke about Little Nest and yeah, we’re going to keep talking about Little Nest. Even if they don’t talk about it, we’ll talk about it. But you know, at a broader level, education is one of the biggest use cases of AI globally. And is that deep tech that we are using to solve for problems like education in our country. Literacy is going to be a very big component of us getting to that $10,000 GDP per capita.

Akash Ambani
I think the, the question is right, I don’t think it’s only an AI problem to solve. I think it’s a deep tech problem to solve. And what do I mean by deep tech? You know, for us there are five layers that create a deep technology company. In this particular use case, the first thing to solve for in education is connectivity, which we pretty much solved in India. You know, today 1.5 million schools, they all have connectivity, you know, at that layer. The second layer on top of that is compute. And not only data center compute, but