Reliance Jio has AI on the brain

• India’s Jio is serious about AI
• It has already announced a generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) service for telco and enterprise networks, dubbed JioBrain, and it’s promising to go much further
• It plans to embed AI into the very fabric of its organisation and infrastructure and then develop AI services for the masses
• Now, having talked the talk, Jio is limbering up to speed-walk the walk

Like many telcos, Reliance Jio has been talking the generative AI (GenAI) talk for some time. Essentially, it says it wants a market-leading GenAI capability, both to serve customers and to transform its internal processes and capabilities, and to that end it has set “hundreds of engineers” to work on GenAI research and development (R&D) to generate what it calls its JioBrain.

Now, India’s leading mobile operator is looking beyond its own four walls and is accelerating its GenAI strategy. As part of his speech at the recent annual general meeting of Jio’s parent company, Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL), chairman and CEO Mukesh Ambani stated that GenAI is the lynchpin of Jio’s future. “We are embedding AI into all our processes and offerings,” proclaimed Ambani. “By perfecting the JioBrain within Reliance, we will create a powerful AI service platform that we can offer to other enterprises as well.”

He continued: “While we are starting in our own backyard, I believe the true power of AI lies in making it accessible to everyone, everywhere… we are committed to democratising AI, offering powerful AI models and services to everyone in India at the most affordable prices.”

Ambitious talk. So what is JioBrain? Essentially, it’s a GenAI-enabled platform that is integrated with high-speed mobile network infrastructure to enable advanced network management and service delivery capabilities. It has been developed by Jio Platforms, of which Reliance Jio is the network operator and services part, and is used by Reliance Jio but is also being made available to other network operators and large enterprises.

As Jio notes on its website: “JioBrain integrates 5G’s high speed, low latency, and massive connectivity with advanced machine learning capabilities, such as anomaly detection, predictive forecasting and automation. The platform can train and apply ML [machine learning] models at the network edge and in the service provider cloud. This enables CSPs [communications service providers] to apply machine learning to not only the network but also to a wide range of 5G services and industrial applications, including image and video AI at the edge, probing at the edge, healthcare, education, gaming, and entertainment use cases. These unique capabilities lead to greater operational visibility, closed-loop automation, and new revenue opportunities.”

And now Jio Platforms wants to go further with its AI plans by developing a broader set of services for a wider market. Starting at the base level, Jio is providing some of its own green power to gigawatt-scale datacentres and is planning its own “AI inference facilities” in collaboration with its global partners. These will be scaled up to meet demand as it grows. According to Ambani, Jio is aiming to “make AI applications in India more affordable than anywhere else.”

While Jio is aiming to spread its GenAI love broadly (with the ambition of reaching every corner of India and touching the lives of every Indian) it plans to pay special attention to four areas: Agriculture, education, healthcare and small business.

It’s a grand ambition that requires a full entry into the cloud business at scale. Effectively Jio wants to become a telecom/cloud hyperscaler – but can it manage it?

The cloud hyperscalers of the early 21st century had a scaled-up approach that enabled ‘big tech’ entities based in both China and the US to thrive as the IT world began to cloud over. The hyperscalers (as they soon became known) made no bones about it: Size and speed are everything. The bigger your datacentres and the more of them you could build economically, the better your chances of success and that’s still the thinking – see Hyperscale datacentre capacity doubling every four years – report.

Can a big Asian telco pull off a similar trick?

Already a major global operator after just eight years of life, its growth story so far is impressive, having ticked off an impressive bingo card of ‘firsts’ and ‘mosts’. According to Ambani, Jio, which ended July with 475.8 million mobile connections to give it a market share of 40.68%, is now the world’s largest mobile data company, its data service prices are just a quarter of the global average, its network’s data consumption is growing by around 33% year, it has completed a nationwide rollout of 5G and attracted more than 130 million 5G subscribers, and expects to sign up 1 million new subscribers a month to its home broadband service.

With this record of telecom market growth, and with the backing and weight of RIL, it would appear to have the ability to carve out a big slice of India’s AI and cloud market, and extend that influence further into other parts of Asia too. 

– Ian Scales, Contributing Editor, TelecomTV