Jio CEO at MWC 2026: AI Era is a Reset, Not an Upgrade, for Global Economy

He also shared Jio's vision to build the Intelligence Grid - not just another network pipe. He noted that Jio will be one of the first token service providers.

Referring to several technologies over these years, he said clearly the world is changing and it is imperative to define, redefine, and the entire telecom and the digital industry as a whole.

"When you look at the investments that is happening in the world, you will see that this year alone, over USD 3 trillion is going to be put in AI. And of that, about USD 810 billion is just for a few of the hyperscalers. And clearly, it is from a GDP perspective, completely different from the industrial to the internet to the internet era," he explained.

"It's clearly a generational transformation and we are industrial. If you look at it, mechanized production internet is what we actually live in. It's the internet and cloud as we evolve into the era. And by the way, the AI era is not an upgrade cycle, it is completely resetting the economic and the business equation because we are going to be creating a new businesses of trillions of dollars and that to me is the biggest opportunity."

Referring to the intelligence economy, he said a couple of things are going to change -- the AI infrastructure and the telecom infrastructure.

"The intelligent endpoints is going to be a key pillar. And we are going to talk about how the functional dismantling of the workforces and how AI is getting embedded into all the critical economic and national grids and the unprecedented scale of disruption of businesses and the business models. "

Going ahead, he said it is not about just re-skilling. "It is a complete reset and it is about leveraging the full capability and not incrementalization of the intelligence opportunity. "

"Now, when you think about the intelligence economy, there are certain building blocks in establishing the leadership. Technology leadership is now the economic leadership. How many people get called into being on daisies that are technology heavyweights? And economic leadership is national leadership. And to get to that national leadership, you will have to embed intelligence into the energy sector, the transportation, the finance, the national defense and security sector. And for all of these sectors, these critical economic vibrant sectors, the foundational layer is going to be the telecom layer, because when you build infrastructure at scale, you will build intelligence at scale," Mathew Oommen said.

AI, if used responsibly and together with the critical resources, he said, is going to be humanities' most impactful tool for continued balancing between earth, our planet and the next generation of transformation.

"The telecom currency is going to be rapidly changing from minutes to bytes to tokens. And we sincerely believe at Jio, we will be one of the first scalable token services provider. And why is that? We made voice (call) free in India. You heard the minister earlier talk about nine cents a GB we delivered as Jio," he said talking about Jio's transformation. "We are determined to deliver the lowest cost of dollar per token per watt."

Union Minister for Communications Jyotiraditya Scindia has inaugurated the Bharat Pavilion at Mobile World Congress 2026 in Barcelona, Spain which is one of the world's foremost technology and telecommunications platforms.

The Union Minister stated that as the world deliberates the future of connectivity in the "IQ Era," India stands at the intersection of intelligence and infrastructure where connectivity meets capability and innovation meets inclusion.

- ANI