Fireside Chat (Sunil Bharti Mittal)

Well, first of all, Craig, congratulations on leading this initiative for the last 15 years. Craig has been not just the chair of GTI, he's been really the spirit within the GSMA. And I just want to begin by saying that GSMA was a very European, white-dominated organization. That's where it started from and for very long years it stayed like that. It needed someone like Craig to start getting the global south, I would say, into the picture. And slowly and surely he inducted Indians, Chinese, Africans to make this GSMA today very different from where it started. That today an Indian gets a lifetime achievement award. I have served as the chair in 2008, got the chairman's award in 2008. Vive Badrat of Indian origin is the director general. Ralph Mupito from South Africa is the vice chair and Gopal Vittal, chairman of Airtel, is the chairman. My god, what a turnaround this association has seen. The reason for this is the massive contribution coming from countries like China, India, Africa. So this association has become global. But I'm very fondly reminded of our first launch when we met on GTI. We were all struggling to find some meaning of the spectrum that we had got in the TDD. And my god, if you would have not put this initiative together and the Chinese would have not stepped up, that opportunity would have got wasted. And then merging it with FDD later on to create a really solid global ecosystem. A great credit goes, Craig, to you personally for GTI and the larger GSMA's diversification. And I think this entire association owes a lot to you. What do these associations mean for the industry or the world? It's very hard for any individual or one or two companies to come together to create a vibrant ecosystem. GSMA-type of associations, GTI initiatives bring and pull together the force of the entire industry or the players of the industry together to deliver the results. Standardization in the beginning, getting the 3GPP, getting the whole world onto a single standard, the same phone that can work anywhere in the world, is a big contribution that this association has given. I've been, like you, a chambers man. I've led the International Chamber of Commerce in Paris for many years, Confederation of Indian Industry, Carnegie Endowment for Peace, CFR, and GSMA. And I know the power of these bodies to deliver. Sometimes a lot of people say these are talk shops. And partly they are. I mean, that's how it works. But there are every now and then gems dropped around to create a fantastic, vibrant ecosystem.

Well, it's a 130 billion dollar company today with 600 million customers serving across 17 countries. After China Mobile, it's the next largest mobile company in the world by customers. The revenues are still small because we serve at two and a half, three dollars, but it's truly a meaningful company today. And given that it's a first-generation founder company, it's been a great run.

Yeah. So I would say AI for us has been used at three layers. The first, the early adoption was to get AI embedded into our own running of our operations. How to have networks more efficient, self-healing networks, self-optimizing networks, energy management. This was where it got injected right in the beginning. So I think that internal layer was very important for us to manage our networks which are very large and vast and wide. And we have seen tremendous amount of uptick in the quality of our network with minimum human intervention. I think the second layer has been our AI injection into our data lake. The converged data engine that we have through which we pick up patterns, the behavior, the activities of our customers of 600 million people. So we have a fabric through which we now know all the needs of our customers so that we are responding to them in real time. Then the next layer has been how do we manage them together through our customer management program on the call centers, on the chatbots, on our retail stores so that everything is stitched together. Then this would not have been possible humanly. We have developed a lot of stuff internally on the back of AI. And the third most powerful injection of AI into our system has been prevention of spam and fraud. We have blocked 71 billion spam calls, 2.9 billion messages into our network and nearly a million fraudulent links by AI's intervention. So we are using it across our entire ecosystem, making ourselves better, making our customers more secure and importantly also showcasing what we can do for our enterprise customers. Revenue streams, we believe we need to ally with the best in the world. So we work with Perplexity, with OpenAI, with Anthropic, with Google Gemini and take those products to our customers at the moment snacking for free but eventually on a revenue-sharing basis where the subscription model will come through.