Tag: work life balance

Last Updated:March 01, 2025, 17:30 IST

In a fireside chat on the sidelines of Mumbai Tech Week 2025, Akash Ambani discussed a host of issues ranging from Artificial Intelligence, lessons from his family, and maintaining work-life balance

Chairman of Reliance Jio Infocomm Akash Ambani speaks during the Mumbai Tech Week event. (Pic/PTI)

Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited (RJIL) Chairman Akash Ambani joined Dream 11 CEO Harsh Jain for a fireside chat on the sidelines of Mumbai Tech Week 2025 and discussed a host of issues ranging from Artificial Intelligence, lessons from his family, maintaining work-life balance, and the need for public-private partnership in furthering tech in the country.

Read the full chat between Ambani and Jain:

Harsh Jain: And so, let’s have another round of applause for the Chairman of Jio, Akash Ambani.

So, thanks Akash, for coming. You can see this room. It’s like, like I was joking this morning. It’s like a Mumbai local train. We have everyone here and everyone’s happy. Whether you’re standing, sitting, doesn’t matter. You’re just happy to be here and be part of this amazing moment where we are really getting Mumbai to shine on the tech ecosystem.

So, you know, first I wanted to start by asking you that, you know, let me first start by telling you a small history about myself when I started Dream11 in Mumbai and every VC would come to me. And this is with all our tech founders here we are, 65 unicorn silicon founders. They would come and say, yeah, you have to move to Bangalore. Why are you in Mumbai? How can you build a company in Mumbai? And they would say, you know, I would say Bangalore me kya hai? And they would say, Swiggy hai, Ola hai, Meesho hai, Flipkart hai, PhonePe hai, Cred hai. And I think you’re going to get where I’m going to. But I would say, mere paas Jio hai and that’s a mic drop moment. I’ll be like, bas ho gaya, end of discussion.

So, thank you for creating the wonder that is Jio for our country. And one other thing I’d love to thank the family for is creating this.. look, look around you. Jio Convention center is really one of the best gifts they could give to the city. So, thank you very much for that. Of course, I have to.

But you know, first I want to start by talking a little bit about the family and Isha, your twin, your better half of the twin side is here and you have Shloka who is the better half of your married life. And they’re both like way more intelligent than us. They’re definitely better looking than us. So, you have all this amazing family support. Now you have two beautiful kids. I love them. Let’s start with something soft and fun like how do you manage, you know, Jio, this amazing company and this work life balance between them.

Akash Ambani: Firstly, thank you very much for having me here. I don’t very often do public speaking and I’m grateful that Isha and Shloka have made all the trip here to give a little bit of confidence. So thank you to both of you for being here. I’m really happy to be here and supporting Mumbai Tech. As we all know that we want to be known as the Tech hub in the country. And if not only in the country, across the world. Coming to balance, you know, I’ve been very, very fortunate that I’ve grown up with a very close knit family as we were growing up. I mean, like Harsh mentioned, Isha and me, we came into this world together and since then we’ve become very, very close. As a family, we’ve always been there. So the first thing is about the values inside the family. And for us, the work was never looked at, the balancing part of life. It was always something which was the biggest part of our life.

Growing up, you know, we saw our parents, both my father and mother, you know, not only try to balance family and work, but make them both the biggest priorities of our life. And that’s something that I’ve continued to embody as we have now been working in Reliance for the last 10 years. So the question of balance really does not come of balancing family or work. Both are the biggest priorities of my life. And there’s one simple funda that I think we all need to embody which is, you know, your priorities of your life. And you know, as you grow older, your priorities change. But you want to make sure that your priorities are something that are very meaningful to make your life what you imagine it to be. And from our point of view, you know, my, my family and my work are the two biggest priorities of my life. Not only for this phase, but going forward also.

Harsh Jain: Yeah, that’s a great answer. Shloka, thumbs up. All right everybody, thumbs up from the wife. You know, talking about your dad, MDA, obviously. Mukesh Ambani for all of us is the inspiration for the whole country. Everyone looks up to him. You have a mom who actually runs larger companies than 99% of our business people in India. So you have this like super achieving family. How do you step into these shoes? These shoes are like very large shoes to fill. And how do you manage and what is your biggest inspiration?

Akash Ambani: You know, Harsh, biggest inspiration goes without doubt is the family that we’ve grown up with. We’ve all lived under one roof for now, 32 years of our lives. And the inspiration is not too far to find in both my parents. I, I deeply value the human beings that they are and the work that they do. But the inspiration really does not come from, you know, large items. Of course, the vision, the boldness, the ability to be very, very inspiring. It comes from the small things, you know, like for example, till date my father clears each and every email that is sent to him and he does it till 2am at night. And he’s working for the fourth decade of his working life. And that’s where the inspiration really comes from. My mom, very, very similarly, like we’ll be staring at the same thing. We share a joint passion for cricket and we’re watching the same TV. But the small little details that she notices is something that you can draw inspiration out of, and I think, out of and above everything, their dedication is the biggest inspiration for everyone around us who have grown up around them. And that’s really why we can say that the biggest inspirations because we can tell all of the small, nuanced things that make the difference. Working at 2am in the morning, clearing an email that is sent to him. And this year will be his 45th year working at Reliance is where you can find him.

Harsh Jain:

That’s amazing. You know, and I’ve personally seen this work ethic growing up. I think we’ve had first-hand experience into just seeing and being inspired by people who, you know from work is actually their life and how they manage it. But at the same time raise a great family and spend quality time there. So I fully agree. Now, you know, you stepped into these big shoes. You’ve now taken on the role of Chairman of Jio. It’s literally the forefront of technology of India. Every single person here is thankful for finally getting us 5G Internet at the best speeds possible while we travel. I get like 150 Mbps in my car, on my phone, which is just phenomenal. How do you feel about this responsibility?

Akash Ambani:

I’m gonna say something which is which I truly believe. Like, I think it’s a great honor to be Chairman. But I’ve never personally worked for titles and they don’t mean a lot to me personally in the sense when we were growing up, what we saw is a legacy being created. Started from my grandfather and extended by my father, my mother, now myself, Isha and Anant trying to continue to build that legacy. What is that legacy? That legacy is really beyond creating impact and creating impact for our country first, then for our company. That’s something that is something that we have to embody. Me and Isha, as we grew into these big shoes to fill, no doubt they’re big shoes to fill, but understanding that impact, creating that impact as we go on into the future, try to create our own businesses, try to create our own impact on society for the good of society and the good for India, and then what happens to the company is next. So it’s not really the Title that you think you should feel the responsibility for. You should feel the responsibility for creating that impact and actually helping millions and millions of Indians to thrive.

Harsh Jain: I think that’s a great answer. We all have to like focus on the impact we create. You know, we’re all very fortunate to be in a country where our domestic product itself can reach 800 million Indians thanks to Jio. And it’s a great time to be running a tech company and to have tech startups for all the entrepreneurs out there. So now let’s talk a bit about AI. You’re at the forefront of Jio, you’re leading it forward. But India is still seen as a laggard, right? We’re still seen as a laggard with tech. We’re always seen as like following, still following the west in terms of tech, in terms of AI. Is that true? How do we change this?

Akash Ambani: I feel the contrary, Harsh. Today, eight years on from launching Jio, we’ve become the biggest data consuming nation around the world. We’ve led that every, every single hour, average consumption per user is now significantly higher than anywhere else in the world, including China. So I think gone are the days that we should think about India from a tech laggard perspective. I think we have established that India is one of the forefront nations that can adopt technology and use technology for the benefit of the country.

In our estimation at Jio, I think AI is the biggest technology change that we have seen in our

lifetime till date. And in my view it is the engine that will empower India to grow at 10% or double digit growth numbers for the foreseeable future. So we continue to what we have to really do to do it. I think there are three fundamental blocks that we have to do to enable us in that AI

leadership movement. I think to continue to invest in AI infrastructure, AI data centers that are

completely ready, that can scale worldwide, scale for India at millions and millions of users. At

Jio we are already doing that. We recently announced in Jamnagar that we’re building our AI

data center which will be a gigawatt capacity data center but continuing to invest at the

infrastructure level.

The second and third thing actually go quite jointly is the research and development part of AI. And I think that now that we are very fortunate that Prime Minister Modi had laid out his, his vision about you know, powering this with the AI mission and all of that. We continue to invest on deep research and deep development come that comes from that research. And then finally I think the proof of the pudding is to invest in the right talent. Right? And what does it really mean to invest in the right talent is get the best of class and foster those engineers coming back, data scientists coming back today at Jio, we’ve already invested in our overall full stack AI team, which is led by data scientists, researchers and engineers to be a thousand plus.

The critical element in this, I feel is also to foster new ideas and push the boundaries of

development..right. It’s not too far away where we will have a groundbreaking idea that will have half a billion people on one platform coming out of India. And I think that’s really what I think will take us to have that AI leadership. I think we’ve already showcased to the world in connectivity that we can be the leaders of technology, not just be fast followers. I mean, you mentioned it in your opening note that not too long ago, I mean, back to 2015, which is just 10 years ago, Internet speeds were less than 1 MB in this country, whether it be on the mobile or at the home. But today, everyone continues to enjoy very high data speeds. And so I think from an AI point of view is these three critical items that we need to focus on.

Harsh Jain: I think that’s very clear and I think everyone here will agree at least. You know, even when we used to go abroad, travel abroad, study abroad, we used to see all these foreign nations with like way faster Internet. And I may be giving a little bit of my age away, but, you know, when we were growing up, we had that, you know, you used to literally dial in through a modem and 1 Mbps was like unbelievable speed. But then when we grew up and we saw speeds in America, we’d be like, what the hell? Why is our speed, you know, why is our Internet speed like this in India? And why is this like, apparently 3G giving me less than 1Mbps. And today I can say that when we travel, we laugh at the world. We literally were there and we are like, wait, you pay 60-70$ a month for crappy Internet? Boss, come to India, just try Jio for a while and then you’ll see what we have. So thank you for that. It’s been an amazing thing to see all of India benefit from this.

You know, you spoke about the public sector also and you spoke about jobs, you spoke about the thousands of engineers. First, let me ask you, a lot of people talk about AI and they say that it’s going to take jobs away. Do you think AI will get rid of a lot of jobs? Do you think we

need to be worried about the amount of jobs that will have to be removed because AI will replace

them.

Akash Ambani: I think at the event of any new technology, this has always been a big kind of shift that jobs are going to be taken away. I’m a firm believer that AI will transform jobs. Today we’ve seen AI take over our mundane tasks, our repetitive tasks. I have Isha and Shloka here that have founded a new preschool in Bombay called Little Nest. I was on the joke, I was, I was telling them that whilst you’re listening to me, please do not start talking about Little Nest. Just listen to me. But the, the one thing that they have also been able to do is, you know, really create the value for the student because of the repetitive mundane jobs like, you know, scheduling has been taken over with AI and we see that as a definite, you know, shift.

I mean if you just think about it, when the Internet was created, no industries were born. You

know, fintech was born, e-commerce was born, a creator economy was born. Imagine even our

generation, Harsh, you know, if you imagine that you can earn a full time living by just being a

content creator on YouTube or Instagram, you know, you have not imagined it. So I’m firmly of

the belief that AI will transform jobs and won’t replace jobs. We at Jio are already embracing it.

The main thing is we’ve seen these shifts happening over time, right? We’ve seen how Internet

can create these new industries, these new jobs, but we can prepare for it this time around. And

when I say we prepare for it is equip ourselves with the right tools, equip ourselves with the right insights to excel our impact, excel our businesses. At Jio, like a small example, today we monitor our network that now covers about 95% of the living population of India. Before, before that, you know, we had to do it across systems. Today we can proactively monitor and before even a customer has a bad experience, experience, we can predict it. And this is just not, you know,

something that is, this is again, instead of deeping/delving deep into the data, figuring out what

the consumer does, the patterns are being picked up by ML engineers, AI engineers to kind of

spend the time to actually solve the problem then finding out what the problem is. So that’s one

way that we prepared.

Harsh Jain: For it at this is already happening. You know, we are significantly actually working on AI. It’s just that maybe we don’t talk about it as much, but there is like rapid deployment of AI systems already.

Akash Ambani: Of course, I, I think, you know, that goes without saying. Our quickest way is to embrace and use AI in the best possible use cases across companies. I think there will be one. What we’re seeing right now is consumer led AI, you know, and but second is company led AI and I think we have to embrace that rather than that. I’m totally a believer in the thought that companies will have to embrace AI or their future is very, very bleak to be modest. But that’s something that we must do on a daily basis. In fact, some of our daily reviews include the scope of work that we have to implement company wide to reimagine some of our company functions. We spoke about our operation centers, the customer care, sales, data analytics. All of that we have to embrace as we build our companies.

Harsh Jain: I think AI is to stay and you can live under a rock or like just hide away from it, but it’s going to transform because it’s a horizontal, it’s not a vertical. It’s going to touch every single part. And I think you guys are doing a phenomenal job to be in front of the curve. But you know, you spoke about Little Nest and yeah, we’re going to keep talking about Little Nest. Even if they don’t talk about it, we’ll talk about it. But you know, at a broader level, education is one of the biggest use cases of AI globally. And is that deep tech that we are using to solve for problems like education in our country. Literacy is going to be a very big component of us getting to that $10,000 GDP per capita.

Akash Ambani: I think the, the question is right, I don’t think it’s only an AI problem to solve. I think it’s a deep tech problem to solve. And what do I mean by deep tech? You know, for us there are five layers that create a deep technology company. In this particular use case, the first thing to solve for in education is connectivity, which we pretty much solved in India. You know, today 1.5 million schools, they all have connectivity, you know, at that layer.

The second layer on top of that is compute. And not only data center compute, but edge compute. And you see us making advancements on that at Jio in all across the nation. After that comes the devices layer where we have to enable devices that can consume and actually deliver to the endpoint which in this case will be the student across, affordability, standpoints across.

So it may be a cloud PC laptop or a low cost laptop. It could be a smartphone tomorrow. It can

be AR glasses that we can use to deliver these devices across to enhance the experience that

we can actually deliver. On top of that comes the content layer where content not in the form of

videos but just educational content or anything. And then comes the intelligence layer. So these

five layers put together, you know, enable us to become solving big problems like education.

And I think there’s a hand in hand right it you cannot solve the education and the literacy problem only by technology. You have to work with institutions that have been created across India to, you know, have a teacher module, have a student module, have a administration module. And that’s really where we think that the future to solve all of these problems are. And finally the five layers that I spoke about, they need to create an absolutely seamless customer experience.

If they do not create a seamless customer experience that is easy to adopt, easy to have, then

it becomes very, very hard for us to solve large issues like the literacy rate and education in

India. We’re going to be doing that. We’re going to enable ourselves. The same similar thing

applies to large issues like agriculture. Similarly, you know, IoT devices, different type of content in those and the same thing for healthcare. So I think it’s a deep tech problem to solve with technology. You need to be sitting and understanding with the local infrastructure and institutions that have been created to solve this problem.

And I think at Jio we will be working at this to ensure that we can do the best scale to impact again the millions and millions of schools and students of India.

Harsh Jain: Yeah, I think that’s one of the biggest use cases and the most value addition that can be given to this country. And I know you do that actually in real life because personally I’ve seen that with like Little Nest, NMAJS, DAIS, the schools are the best in the country and that’s because they keep evolving and advancing because AI is going to be a part of our kids lives. They are going to have the whole world interact with us. Right. We already are seeing that. Imagine what they are going to have in 10 years from now. So it’s a, you know, we have to embrace it. Now, you know the government, you spoke about the public sector.. how do you see the government working with the private sector? Because the future of tech and AI in this country will only get achieved if we have a full collaboration between a public private partnership.

Akash Ambani: You know, I think we’re extremely lucky to be under the visionary leadership of our Prime minister Narendra Modi on this. I think, you know, it is the biggest blessing of our country to have a leader like him leading this mission. Recently, you know, at Parliament he mentioned that AI does not only just start for artificial intelligence. It actually stands for Aspiring Indian.

Harsh Jain: Aspiring Indian – I love it.

Akash Ambani: It’s not, not my quote, it’s our Prime Minister’s quote. So. And I think, and I think that is really the core mission that we should be. We should always look to aspire to greater heights. I think what he’s done with the AI mission of this country is exemplary. You know, we’re amongst the first nations to make AI a priority in, in the country. And it’s not only for the country but, but you know, it’s a place of collaboration that we can have with the world. Again, you know, I think he’s already set out the vision and we need to make sure that we go. And the one thing about this government is they work on a very, very fast basis. They want to. So it’s for the private industries to work at that pace, continue to, you know, innovate at, you know, very, very fast pace. Where they be at the infrastructure level, whether it be at, you know, the products and services layer that is going to be enabling.

Harsh Jain: The government is an enabler and the private companies have to actually push forward innovation and AI.

Akash Ambani: Absolutely, absolutely. And I think, you know, when it’s a national, you know, priority, that is, that is something that we’re very, very blessed to be.

Harsh Jain: Absolutely. The India AI mission is here today and we work from them already. So but you know, we still have like today we’re very proud to have Google, Amazon, Apple, Meta, most of which will spoke today already, some who are speaking tomorrow. Do you think that India also is going to have some platforms like this that are going to come out? Can Jio be one of those platforms?

Akash Ambani: No, I just think that we speak about Google and Meta, but some of the platforms that we’ve scaled, UPI, the JAM trinity, these are world class ecosystems that has been created in India today. UPI has not benefited only the consumers, but it’s created businesses to be enabled. On top of that, it’s made the ecosystem a very, very seamless ecosystem. So I think we need to start talking about India first innovations that we have done and done them really at world class standards.

The fact today that we’re exporting our UPI solution to other countries speaks volumes of itself. At Jio, we also imagine ourselves to be platform companies. One of our biggest growth missions of Jio and the way where we want to make impact is connecting each home. And in the home, we not only offer broadband connectivity but we offer our own OS which is a Tele OS that powers the large screen at the home. It is our vision to reach 100 million homes in the shortest amount of time possible. And I think we have now the technology and the demand to do so to enable that. But with that we’ll be opening ourselves up as a platform for developers to come on top of, have access to these homes, really reach all of those consumers. And then you have to deploy India First Solutions.

Right? If you don’t deploy India first solutions for India, it’s not a cookie cutter that we need to look and have inspiration from the west, but really look and say that what is the need of all of these Indians as a virtue of which we’ll now not be covering just the cities, but we’re covering pretty much all of India from a connectivity standpoint of homes and empowering them with this powerful TVOs of sorts that can reach into those. And once the scale comes of, you know, 100

million homes and each home will have multiple users, then we’ll be able to build really a platform that can sustain this growth for the Indian entrepreneurship and tech hub. So that’s one thing I think on the business side we’ll also build JioBrain so that you can have ML as a service where you don’t have to have particular expertise or have the costly infrastructure that comes with building an AI business that you can just tag on to JioBrain and we’ll launch that in the coming quarters as we perfect the use cases for that. But these are the two things of platforms that we will also enable. But I think it’s time that we start recognizing our initiatives that we’ve already, you know, in terms of ecosystems and platforms that are enabling, you know, multiple hundred millions of users in India.

Harsh Jain: Yeah, I think you’re absolutely right. Like things like UPI, we’ve now almost started to take it for granted. But when you travel also, you realize just how far behind the world is in terms of peer to peer money, you know, making quick payments, easy payments. India’s just leapfrogged entirely.

The way Jio took us from, you know, 3G, which wasn’t working properly, to like 5G, which is the

world’s best…in a few years we leapfrogged that entire technology wave. And I can tell you all

it’s a small secret between 5,000 of us. But you know, this is not just a vision, this is actually

something that, that Akash has running in his home. What you’re talking, what he’s talking about

here is like, you know, have any of you all seen Iron man movie with Jarvis. Right? That’s the

kind of stuff they already have and they’re working on to bring to our homes. You will have AI in

your homes which will, you know, the data is protected, you know, is completely localized and

help you with your tasks. It’ll help you with your home. It’ll help you with whatever you want. I

mean, it’s amazing the stuff you have. I can’t wait for all of our homes to have it. And the stuff

that you’re talking about, Jio Brain, the connected home, it’s coming, it’s a reality, so watch out for that.

You know, overall, I think Jio is doing some fantastic foundation work as well for

entrepreneurship. This will set up a platform for all these, you know, look around like these are

so many tech entrepreneurs and people and engineers who would love to get access. So are

you guys looking at it as a foundation work for entrepreneurship and what’s your vision for Jio?

Akash Ambani: You know, at the very core, Reliance was founded by an entrepreneur who returned to India in the middle of 1960s. That was my grandfather. So entrepreneurship is a culture at Reliance. That’s something that we’ve been able to establish. And what does it really mean that we don’t really follow hierarchy in terms of where ideas come from, but to have a very flat organization and evaluate an idea on the merit of the idea and the power of its execution and the impact that we can do.

I think at Jio, we bear the responsibility of launching products that can scale to millions and

millions of Indian at giving the best customer experience and at a very affordable rate. I think our latest example of Jio Hotstar is something like that. When it comes to platforms that drive

entrepreneurship. I just spoke about too, you’ll see us be very, very active in that space, building our platforms as we build out this infrastructure. I think also, you know, GPU as a service, that is something that we can think about, you know, and launch so that there’s a bedrock that people can create on top of similarly, you know, consumer applications. We have an application that we’ll be shortly launching, which is a cloud PC, which is a complete PC in your cloud that is accessible in each of your homes, but really be device agnostic.

Harsh Jain: Because no hardware except the screen.

Akash Ambani: Except the screen

Harsh Jain: Your own screen

Akash Ambani: Not our own screen, any screen that can power that. But you’ll. And you can build high compute AI applications on top of that. And what you can leverage is the reach that Jio is going to have. And that is a definite track. At Jio that we think through. And I think it’s our responsibility to create that impact. One at a consumer level that we will be doing with our direct products. But also the second is for businesses in India, startups in India and entrepreneurs at India.

Harsh Jain: Amazing. I think like this whole vision is like very crystal clear. I love the clarity with which you’re like executing it. And honestly, like, I’m sure all these people, we can’t wait to have this kind of tech at home. And I know Jio is going to give it an affordable cost. It’s not going to have maybe a 30% charge for our entrepreneurs on platforms. I won’t say who does that. And it, you know, keeping up with the Jio mentality of bringing affordable data to the masses. I’m sure you’ll carry that on.

Akash Ambani: Absolutely. I mean like I said, at Jio we bear the responsibility of launching, you know, products and services that can impact millions and million, hundreds of millions of Indians and that you’ll see from us. And you can’t really impact it if it’s not cost affordable. You know, Jio is a pan India company. We acquire customers from tier one cities to tier six cities. You know, top thousand towns of India is covered by Jio. That’s the connectivity impact that we’ve had. But even with our platforms, it’s something that we aim to do. Yeah, yeah.

Harsh Jain: That’s amazing. The last question I want to ask you is actually about Jio. Very few people know much about the Jio campus. There is this mammoth Jio campus in Mumbai. How many? What’s the size like? How many, how many people do you have there? How many?

Akash Ambani: Yeah, well, you know, our campus is right here in the city. With the new infrastructure in the city, it’s very easy to get to. It’s about a 40 minute drive from the location that you are at. We now host, the campus itself hosts about 25,000 people out of which Jio on its own host about 10 or 12,000 people that are living there.

And I think the impact of Jio is one, you know, we are going to be on the forefront of technology

and platforms and ecosystems that enable that. And that’s really our mission at Jio. And we can,

when not that old a company, I spoke about the entrepreneurship culture within Jio and to really

do that at a national scale is something that you can get, you know, working at, working at Jio.

And like I said, we are in our head, we are the world’s largest startup.

Harsh Jain: And that’s a struggling series, a kind of startup just…

Akash Ambani: Getting our rounds and just, you know, have to go to Bangalore to find a couple of bucks. But. But yeah, I mean, the national scale that Jio gives you, the impact that you can create on this nation and really that entrepreneurship mindset that is there is something that I’m very, very lucky to have witnessed every single day that I go office and like Harsh said, we have a wonderful campus. It sprawls across 500 acres. It’s kind of inspired. Isha did a lot of work to build that campus. It is, it is kind of inspired. Like a college campus. You know, there’s world class sporting facilities, you know, electric culture, hyper collaboration and meeting spots where you can connect, collaborate with each other. And that’s the kind of culture that we’ve tried to enable at Jio. And it’s right here in Mumbai. I open its doors for anyone who would like to visit our campus.

Harsh Jain: Wow. For real?

Akash Ambani: Yeah.

Harsh Jain: Okay, everyone here, you hear that? Like, you must check out Jio’s campus. It’s stunning. And can you believe we have. They have over 10,000 engineers working in Mumbai, right? This people ask, where are all the engineers now? You know where they are. They’re all at Jio, working on cutting edge data tech, deep tech, AI enabling what, 800 million online Indians to dream the impossible. So, yeah, good. I think that this has been phenomenal and thank you for being so open about it.

The vision for Jio, the vision for like pushing AI boundaries forward for our country, the complete encouragement that we all have that a – first of all, that if Jio thinks it’s a startup, we’re also, we’re all a little bit screwed. Okay. Because I don’t know what we’ll be. But, but jokes apart, it’s great to see that culture. That’s the culture that you want in, you know, your company is that despite being at your scale, you think, you know, nimble, you’re agile, you pivot, you change and adapt. And I think that’s what’s going to keep you ahead of the curve.

But before we end this, let’s have some fun. Okay? We’re in Mumbai, we’re in the land of coffee

with Karan and all of this. So we’re gonna play some rapid fire with Aakash. Just a few questions

to have some fun.

You with us, everyone? Yes. All right, for anyone that knows about, you know, Aakash and the

family’s working timing, I’m gonna start off with something fun with that.

Would you rather work 8am to 5pm or 5pm to 8am?

Akash Ambani: It’s a tough one…I think it’s more like 8am to less like 12 hours plus days. But now that I have, you know, two wonderful children at home, they draw me back. My. I’m very lucky to have a wife like Shloka who understands, you know, the working hours. But like I said, I don’t think about it in terms of timings and the amount of hours. It’s about the quality of work that you do on a daily basis. And I think one of the ‘growth is life’ is. I know it’s supposed to be rapid fire, but I feel very strongly about this answer. ‘Growth is life’ is a motto of Reliance, but it also applies to your personal life. So you have to grow with every single day that is passing. You know, go into areas that you’re uncomfortable with and grow from there.

Harsh Jain: Yeah, that’s a good question. But like, and I actually growth is life is literally like the one of the best lines I’ve actually heard. It’s such a simple thing, but it defines all of us, the whole universe.

All right, harder question. Arsenal or Mumbai Indians?

Akash Ambani: For everyone who doesn’t know, I’m also an Arsenal fan. Of course I am a Mumbai Indian.

Harsh Jain: See, you have to have one Arsenal fan in India. No.

Akash Ambani: So I think there are a bunch of us.

Harsh Jain: How are Manchester United?

Akash Ambani: It’s a… The answer from the heart is Mumbai Indians. But Arsenal was my. Arsenal was my why I became a fan of sport. Right. So they both have special places. But of course Mumbai Indians, it’s something that I live by every day. Try to create our legacy there.

Harsh Jain: All right, so now. But you have Mumbai Indians. You have MI Cape Town. You have MI New York. You have I think five. Now which Mumbai Indians is your favorite?

Akash Ambani: How can you choose between all your babies but the first baby. And you know, Mumbai Indians is the IPL team is at the forefront of every everything that we want to do and achieve. Hopefully we have a good season this year and take it from there.

Harsh Jain: You’ve got a great team. I’m sure this time is going to bring the World cup back home. It’s the most successful franchise. We’ll keep it up. Last couple of quick questions before we wrap up.

So NMA is Nita Mukesh Ambani and MD is Mukesh Dhirubhai Ambani. Meeting with NMA or meeting with MDA?

Akash Ambani: Depends on whose mood is better of the day. No, no, no. Both. Both are.

Harsh Jain: You have to pick one.

Akash Ambani: Cricket meetings with NMA and business meetings with MDA.

Harsh Jain: Okay, that’s good. That’s good. But NMA actually like, like, you’ll be shocked. I.. I do sports for a living and I can’t have a conversation about sports with your mom or you now. Also like, they come up with all these players. They know these players who are playing in Ranji debut and they’re playing in some county cricket in England. And it’s just, it’s actually amazing the deep research that they get into. Whenever they pick up anything, they’ll outdo any expert in the field.

And last question, since we have Shloka here also date night with Shloka or gaming night with

the boys.

Akash Ambani: The aspiration is for a gaming night with Shloka.

Harsh Jain: Great answer, great answer. All right, we’ll leave you with that. But first of all, Shloka, Isha, thank you so much for the support for being here. Isha, Jio Convention Center, the Jio campus, everything you’re building, the schools is just phenomenal. It’s the best in India. Even, even the hospitals are the best. So thank you. Mumbai loves you for that. And Akash, it’s been phenomenal. You should do this more often. Look at this. You’ve got like this thousands of people captivated with what’s going on.

Akash Ambani: I’m sure they’ve been very bored over the last 45 minutes or so.

Harsh Jain: But are you bored? Are you not entertained?

Akash Ambani: Like I said, my priorities, my work. So I am going to office and then coming back home to a wonderful family.

Harsh Jain: No, this was, this was honestly phenomenal for us to hear about. Jio is an inspiration for all the tech founders. It’s an inspiration of how to have larger clarity, macro level clarity and then jump into micro level execution for all of you all. We have so many students here, freshers, professionals. Please check out the Jio campus. It is unbelievable. It’s a distant number one choice for being, you know, an employer of choice. Dream 11 will be number two, shameless plug. But this has been phenomenal. Aakash, thank you so much for your time. Ladies and gentlemen, please can we have a round for Akash Ambani.

Akash Ambani: Thank you very much everyone.