New Delhi, February 17 The convergence of connectivity and computing power will reshape how citizens, businesses, and governments interact in India, with artificial intelligence poised to amplify the country's already robust digital public infrastructure, a top executive at Reliance Jio said on Tuesday.
Speaking at the AI Impact Summit, Shyam Prabhakar Mardikar, CTO, Mobility, at Reliance Jio, said that India is nearly a decade ahead of many developed economies in building population-scale digital platforms, from digital payments and online banking to Aadhaar-based identity systems and paperless air travel through Digi Yatra.
"India's digital infrastructure is already a huge success story," Mardikar said at the five-day summit, which began on Monday.
"Now, imagine adding intelligence to it, making it aware, inclusive, and accessible to every citizen in every village," he added.
He said that putting AI into existing nationwide digital systems could expand the government's reach and improve decision-making, public service delivery, and citizen outcomes.
The combination of robust networks and scalable computing power would enable more responsive governance and targeted welfare programs, he added.
India's rapid adoption of digital payments, biometric identity, and mobile broadband has laid the foundation for the next phase of growth, the CTO said, noting that the evolution of telecom networks from voice to messaging, data, and video is entering a more intuitive era.
"We are talking about every decade, when we started with voice, moved to messaging, moved to data, to video. Now we are getting into a level which is so inclusive, which is so intuitive, that there is a human-AI harmony in the next generations to come. But this is not only the networks that have come up with the AI now in the coming years. This is really, really moving away from basic compute to shared resources, now from recognition to intuitive," Mardikar said.
When connectivity and computing power converge at scale, the real beneficiaries are all of us as citizens, as businesses, and as a nation, the CTO said.
