Episode
Google and Perplexity paid Jio and Airtel a fortune to reach Indian users. OpenAI paid nobody
- Podcast
- Daybreak
- Published
- Jun 22, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 540
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://share.transistor.fm/s/107c3362
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Summary
India's telcos looked like the obvious gateway for AI companies chasing scale. With nearly 900 million subscribers between them, Jio and Airtel could put an AI product in front of more users faster than almost any other distribution channel in the world. So Google paid Jio and Perplexity paid Airtel. Both spent tens of thousands of rupees per user to make it work. One partnership is still standing but the other collapsed before its time was up. And OpenAI — the company with the largest AI user base in India — skipped the telco route entirely. What does OpenAI know about this model that the others are still learning? Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.