Barcelona, Mar 4 (TNT) : The artificial intelligence (AI) era marks a fundamental reset of the global economy rather than a routine technology upgrade for the telecom sector, Matthew Oommen, Group CEO of Jio Platforms Limited, said on Wednesday.
Addressing delegates at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, Oommen said the world is transitioning from an economy driven by “minutes and bytes” to one centred on “tokens and intelligence.”
“The industrial era was based on production. The internet era brought connectivity and cloud. The AI era will completely transform the economic equation.
This is not an upgrade cycle; it is a complete reset,” he said, citing trillion-dollar global investments in AI as evidence of the magnitude of the shift.
Calling it the biggest opportunity for the telecom industry, Oommen said Jio sees its role evolving beyond that of a connectivity provider to becoming the builder of an “Intelligence Grid.”
“The currency of telecom has shifted from minutes to bytes and will now move to tokens. We aim not only to be the largest token pipe but the largest token generator,” he said.
He explained that the telecom industry’s evolution can be traced through three phases — voice measured in minutes, data measured in bytes, and the forthcoming AI phase measured in tokens. These tokens would represent AI-driven services such as computation, model inference, automated decision-making and machine-to-machine communication.
Recalling Jio’s disruption of the Indian telecom market, Oommen said the company made voice services free and reduced data costs to nine cents per GB, extending digital connectivity to over 525 million users.
The next objective, he said, is to deliver “token-per-watt at the lowest cost,” building large-scale, affordable intelligence infrastructure.
Referring to an “AI Command Architectural Framework,” he said future networks would move away from fragmented systems to unified architectures where AI and telecom infrastructure function in tandem to think, coordinate and act in real time.
Oommen said technology leadership has become synonymous with economic leadership and will ultimately determine national leadership. Embedding intelligence across sectors such as energy, transport, finance and security would be critical, with telecom infrastructure forming the backbone of that transformation.
While acknowledging concerns about AI-led disruption, he termed the shift “the biggest opportunity of our lifetimes,” adding that telecom operators who embrace the transformation would lead the future economy.
TNT KS
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