India’s telecom operators, Bharti Airtel and Reliance Jio, have shifted their competitive focus from 5G deployment to establishing supremacy in the artificial intelligence (AI) domain. This strategic pivot aims to expand market shares and capture higher tariff-paying customers to boost Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) by offering advanced digital services alongside traditional voice and data.

Reliance Intelligence, the AI arm of Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL), announced a significant partnership with Google, offering Jio users the latest version of Google Gemini AI Pro free of cost for 18 months. This initiative, valued at ₹35,000, targets early access for 18-25-year-old users on unlimited 5G plans, with a rapid rollout planned for all Jio customers nationwide. Jio users will gain access to the Gemini 2.5 Pro model within the Gemini app, enabling higher limits for generating images and videos using its Nano Banana and Veo 3.1 models, expanded access to NotebookLM for study and research, and 2TB of cloud storage. This move follows Google's existing 7.7% stake in Jio Platforms Ltd.

Preceding Jio's announcement, Bharti Airtel had partnered with Perplexity in July, providing its subscribers a 12-month Perplexity Pro subscription, valued at ₹17,000, free of cost. Perplexity is recognized as an AI-powered search and answer engine that delivers real-time, accurate, and deeply researched responses in a conversational format. While Jio currently boasts a larger subscriber base of 506.4 million (with 234 million 5G users as of September), Airtel leads in ARPU at ₹250, with a mobile subscriber base of 362.8 million as of June.

Reliance Intelligence's ambitions extend beyond consumer offerings. Mukesh D. Ambani, chairman of RIL, emphasized the goal to make intelligence services accessible to 1.45 billion Indians, fostering an AI-empowered nation. To this end, Reliance Intelligence is also becoming a strategic go-to-market partner for Google Cloud, promoting the adoption of Gemini Enterprise across Indian organizations. Gemini Enterprise is an AI platform designed for businesses to integrate Google AI into every employee's workflow, enabling teams to discover, create, share, and run AI agents. Additionally, Reliance Intelligence will develop its own pre-built enterprise AI agents within Gemini Enterprise, expanding choices for users.

Further strengthening its AI infrastructure, Reliance has partnered with Google Cloud to access its advanced AI hardware accelerators, Tensor Processing Units (TPUs). This collaboration aims to empower more organizations to train and deploy complex AI models, facilitate faster inferencing for demanding projects, and accelerate AI adoption across the broader Indian AI ecosystem. RIL is also developing a massive gigawatt-scale AI computing infrastructure project in Jamnagar, Gujarat, which analysts at Morgan Stanley estimate could involve an investment of $12-15 billion to develop a 1GW data center, with RIL underwriting approximately 25% of its capacity. This facility is poised to become one of the world's largest data-center facilities.

In August, Ambani launched Reliance Intelligence and announced expanded partnerships with shareholders Google and Meta Platforms for AI applications and services. More recently, a new joint venture, Reliance Enterprise Intelligence, was announced with Meta, in which Meta will hold a 30% stake and invest $97 million. This venture aims to build and scale enterprise AI solutions for customers in India and international markets.

The broader telecom sector outlook has been upgraded by analysts, citing an expanding total addressable market (TAM) driven by products such as fixed broadband, value-added services, and enterprise offerings including data centers, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), and managed services. The push for 5G is attracting premium customers, home broadband is expanding, and new digital services like cloud, AI, and cybersecurity are opening fresh revenue streams for operators, indicating a transformative phase for the industry.