Reliance Jio’s next big bets – AI, FWA & 6G

With India now leading global data consumption, Reliance Jio is preparing for the next wave of telecom innovation powered by AI, fixed wireless access (FWA), and a clear path to 6G.

“We are standing at the cusp of yet another revolution or rather two revolutions,” said Ayush Bhatnagar, Senior Vice President at Reliance Jio, pointing to AI and the evolution from 5G to 5G Advanced and eventually 6G.

Jio has already announced partnerships with Nokia, Cisco, and AMD to develop an open telecom AI platform.

JioBrain, the enterprise suite which offers AI-as-a-service, will embed AI agents directly into the network. “Gone will be the days when we will operate networks using scripts and complex algorithms. Everything will move to natural language processing… We will be able to converse with our network and drive operations with our speech alone,” he said at the ET Telecom Congress 2025.

Jio is now implementing 11 AI-driven initiatives through JioBrain to improve network efficiency, from predictive maintenance to energy optimization. “AI taken together with Enterprise 5G provides a unique customer value proposition,” he added.

He recounted Jio’s journey in building the world’s largest 5G network.

“When we started deploying 5G in October of 2022, India was nowhere on the map of technology,” Bhatnagar recalled. “There were deployments in China and the US, but India was still trailing this technology.”

Since then, Jio has built what it claims is the world’s largest 5G network, lighting up a 5G cell “every 60 seconds” at the peak of its rollout. Bhatnagar emphasized that 5G must not be the domain of a few. “5G has to be available for all and it should not be a monopoly of a select few.”

He highlighted the success of Jio’s fixed wireless access (FWA) offering, which now serves nearly 5 million homes. “Very soon, at this rate, we will be the largest FWA provider anywhere in the world,” he noted.

With Jio now contributing to global 3GPP standards for 6G, he concluded, “Very soon, standards which we were following so far, we will be actually the creators of the standards in the years to come.”