Reliance Industries is pushing AI into phone calls, mobile apps, and connected home displays for its 500 million Jio users, with chairman Mukesh Ambani positioning the conglomerate as India's answer to the US and Chinese labs that dominate the global AI market. At Friday's annual shareholder meeting in Mumbai, Reliance unveiled Jio Call Agent, an assistant that joins live phone calls to transcribe, summarize, and execute tasks like booking cabs and ordering food, activated by a "Hey Jio" trigger. The service is expected to launch later this year. Earlier in 2026, Reliance committed $110 billion to AI infrastructure, one of the largest single-country AI capex pledges announced to date.
The distribution play is the news. By baking the assistant into the carrier network rather than shipping a standalone app, Jio is wiring AI directly into the dial tone for 500 million subscribers — a footprint roughly 1.5 times the entire US population. That bypasses the app-store funnel that gates rivals from Amazon and Google and gives Reliance an installed base no Western consumer-AI product can match in a single market.
Reliance also showed an AI-powered MyJio app that can handle natural-language requests for tasks like eSIM activation and roaming plan selection, plus TeleFrame, a home display that surfaces weather alerts, schedules, and household reminders through proactive AI agents. The home device puts Reliance in the same product category Amazon and Google have been circling with ambient assistants, but with a domestic distribution channel neither US company controls in India.
Key facts
- 01Jio Call Agent will roll out later this year to more than 500 million Jio users, embedded directly in the telecom network.
- 02Reliance earlier this year committed $110 billion to AI infrastructure investment in India.
- 03Jio Platforms' board approved a draft IPO prospectus with a fresh issue of up to 270 million shares.
- 04Reliance Intelligence's AI services will support 22 Indian languages across healthcare, education, agriculture, and small business verticals.
- 05Reliance shares are down roughly 17% this year, raising the stakes on new AI-driven growth narratives.
The rollout follows last year's launch of Reliance Intelligence, the unit building AI infrastructure and services for consumers, enterprises, and the Indian government, with support for 22 Indian languages baked into the stack. Reliance also introduced vertical AI products branded JioHealthIQ, JioLearnIQ, JioKrishiIQ, and AI Vyapar, covering healthcare, education, agriculture, and small businesses respectively.
“India should not be a mere consumer of AI created elsewhere. It must become a creator, adopter, and a global leader in AI.”— Mukesh Ambani, Chairman of Reliance Industries
Ambani, 69, framed the strategy in nationalist terms at the shareholder meeting, arguing India needs to build rather than rent its AI stack. The framing has commercial teeth: recent restrictions on access to some of Anthropic's latest models in India have shown how foreign-lab decisions can disrupt Indian startups overnight, the kind of supply-chain risk that pushes domestic conglomerates toward building their own infrastructure rather than leasing someone else's.
The financing context matters. Ambani told shareholders Jio Platforms' board approved a draft IPO prospectus including a fresh issue of up to 270 million shares, clearing a path for the long-awaited public listing. Reliance shares are down about 17% this year, putting pressure on Ambani to surface new growth narratives ahead of the Jio float.
Reliance has been stacking partnerships to underwrite the buildout. The company has ongoing collaborations with Google, Meta, and Nvidia, and last week announced a joint AI data center project with Meta in the western state of Gujarat. That builds on Meta's earlier investment in Jio Platforms and a joint venture launched last year to develop enterprise AI solutions for India and overseas markets. The Meta tie-up gives Reliance compute access and model partnerships; the Nvidia relationship covers silicon for the planned $110 billion infrastructure rollout.
Reliance is not the only Indian giant chasing the opportunity. Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys, and the Adani Group have all expanded AI initiatives, with partnerships spanning Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI. India's largest corporations are visibly racing to claim a default-provider position before any single foreign lab cements one for them.
There are open questions Reliance did not answer Friday. The company said the new AI services would operate with user consent but declined to specify whether data generated through Jio Call Agent, MyJio, or TeleFrame could be used to train AI models or be shared with technology partners. For a service that proposes to sit inside hundreds of millions of phone calls, the data-handling terms will determine whether regulators and consumers accept the product at scale. India's data protection framework is still maturing, and a 500-million-user voice-AI deployment will be a test case regardless of how Reliance answers.
The Jio Call Agent bet is the most aggressive consumer-AI distribution move announced anywhere this year, and it reframes the Indian market: instead of US labs licensing access to Indian users through apps and APIs, Reliance is trying to own the assistant layer at the network level, then sell vertical products on top. If Jio Platforms prices its IPO on the strength of an AI growth story rather than a telecom one, the $110 billion infrastructure commitment starts to look less like vanity capex and more like a moat. The risk for Google, Amazon, and OpenAI is straightforward — in the world's most populous AI market, the default assistant may end up being the one that answers the phone.
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