Centre's policies, Jio leadership to usher India into intelligence-based economy: JPL's Mathew Oommen

Centre's policy initiatives and Reliance Jio’s Chairman Akash Ambani leadership together with the youth demography, will lead India to an intelligence-based economy, a top telco executive said.

“I am deeply confident that with India's policy and the government leadership, the next generation of leadership at Jio, led by our own Akash Ambani, and with the immense capability of India's youth, India's leadership in the intelligence economy will be unparalleled,” Mathew Oommen, group CEO at Jio Platforms Limited (JPL), said on Friday at the fifth edition of the ETTelecom Awards 2026.



Since June 2022, Ambani has been at the helm of the country's largest telco that has emerged as the top 5G telecom carrier globally, excluding China, by subscribers. Last year in August, JPL crossed the milestone of 500 million subscribers.

In India, it operates the largest 5G fixed wireless access (FWA) service with more than 9 million subscribers.

Oommen stated that, as among the market leaders in telecom and technology domains, India’s responsibility is not just to scale what it has built, but to define and build upcoming platforms and technologies in the new era.

A next-generation India-owned intelligence stack, according to him, will be based on a secure, sovereign, and open architecture built on distributed intelligence powered by Distributed Token Infrastructure (DTI), and a Universal Token Interface (UTI).

“It will be resilient to global shifts, and designed not just to serve India, but as a model for the world to embrace. The global south and the world itself are expecting that we, as the largest democracy, deliver on this critical transformational engine,” the chief executive said.

When the world needed a payments revolution, India did not replicate existing systems. We built UPI. A foundational platform that enabled innovation at scale and is now being adopted globally. UPI did not mandate one bank, one wallet, or one interface. It created rails on which thousands of innovations could run.

“DTI and UTI represent a similar opportunity—India’s next-generation digital rails—for the intelligence economy. open. interoperable. sovereign,m and scalable.”

The top telecom incumbent said the artificial intelligence (AI)-era presents an opportunity for telecom operators to evolve from providing connectivity and digital services to intelligence infrastructure and tokens as a key service block no longer the typical Telecom Service Providers rather Token Service Providers and form the backbone of the intelligence economy.

“The nations that will lead this era are not necessarily those with the most powerful GPUs or the largest models, they are the ones who design the intelligence systems that are distributed, interoperable, resilient, and inclusive.”

Oommen said that as the world forays into the next phase where intelligence has become the new currency, generative AI (GenAI), agentic systems, and large language models (LLMs), are transforming how societies think, decide, secure, and lead. “In this moment, telecom and digital infrastructure are no longer enablers. They are the foundational building blocks.”

Now, as we are entering the next phase, a new phase where intelligence becomes the new currency. A currency that builds New Leaders, New Businesses and New India!”

Mumbai-based Jio has been adopting aggressive AI strategy, and launched the Jio AI Platform, JioBrains and JioAICloud.