Mukesh Ambani on R&D and Innovation

Ambani traced his technology obsession across decades: chemical engineering in the 1970s as Reliance moved from textiles into energy, and mobile internet in the 2010s. He argued that the next 20 years would overshadow the prior 300 — 'I wish I was 30 years old today' — and that purpose, not profit, drove Reliance, sequencing societal value, then customer, then employee, then shareholder value, in that order.

Ambani positioned Jio as an all-IP network at a scale no operator had attempted — voice, data and video encapsulated in internet protocol with the world's largest VoLTE system. He pushed back on the assumption that India was a kilobyte or megabyte country, insisting that the customer trials on voice clarity, call-connect time and indoor coverage had to be exhaustive because the architecture was unprecedented.

To eliminate activation friction, Ambani pushed Aadhaar-based eKYC verification that compressed SIM activation to 10-15 minutes, targeting single-digit minutes. Crediting Nandan Nilekani's design, he noted that the same stack could reduce number-portability time from seven days to fifteen minutes — turning portability into a weapon that incumbent inertia could no longer neutralize.