Keynote by Uday Shankar Vice Chairman_JioStar India

Let me begin by first of all congratulating our Honorable Prime Minister on his vision and leadership in centering this country’s growth agenda around artificial intelligence. I must also compliment the India AI team for executing so flawlessly on the Prime Minister’s vision and bringing us all together at this seminal forum. The summit could not have come a day too soon. As for myself, I am not here to talk about the technology of AI. Enough debate has happened on that and I do not want to add to the debate on whether we are ready. Whether we are ready and whether that whole debate of good versus evil. We do a lot of that in our entertainment stories.

But I personally am a big believer in the power of harnessing emerging technologies to transform societies, businesses, and lives of people. Over three decades as a media professional, I have had a ringside view of technology’s transformative impact, starting with the introduction of the first personal computer in newsrooms and the launch of India’s first end -to -end digital news platform, Aajitak. At every stage since, technology has allowed the businesses I have been involved with to operate with speed, agility, and efficiency that fundamentally changed our relationship with audiences. At each of these inflection points, these businesses have been at the forefront of adopting and introducing innovations to Indian people. This has helped all stakeholders. It is exactly because of this adoption of cutting -edge technologies that India has been A late entrant to the world of technology has been a key part of the development of media and entertainment has rapidly become one of the most exciting media markets globally.

The transformation has truly been extraordinary. Within the span of just about a quarter century or so, we have gone from an industry valued at just a few billion dollars to the fifth largest media and entertainment market in the world. We are valued with our economic contribution going to over 30 billion dollars. We have transitioned from one sleepy broadcaster at the turn of the century to about 900 channels across dozens of languages. Our consumer universe has expanded from about 70 million households to more than 210 million television households and over 800 million video viewers. And the content itself has evolved beyond recognition. From a few tentative experiments in family drama to a vast, diverse, multilingual, ecosystem serving the most heterogeneous consumer universe in the world.

In this process, we have built an ecosystem that has fired the aspirations and ambitions of the whole country. The aspirations of a generation of Indians, what they wanted to become and what they thought was possible, have been shaped as much by what they watched as by what they were taught. While the social impact gives me immense satisfaction, the economic and business impact is equally compelling. At Geostar alone, we have invested over $10 billion in content over the past three years, and that will continue to be the case going forward, if anything. Every major global media enterprise is competing fiercely for the Indian viewers’ attention. Those who are not here are not here simply because they could not crack this complex market.

So the key question… The key question is what can AI do for the… Indian media industry that we are already not doing? To answer that, we need to zoom out and look at the broader landscape a little bit. Despite our remarkable domestic progress, India has not yet broken through as a global content powerhouse. We still produce and consume domestically. Compare this to countries with far smaller population, less cultural diversity, and less formidable technological capabilities that despite those, they have managed to capture the global imagination. A small country like South Korea gave the world squid games and Parasite. Puerto Rico, an island of 3 million people, just gave the world the most streamed artist on the planet, performing entirely in Spanish, headlining the Super Bowl halftime show, but gravitating.

Grabbing global attention. These cultures dared to imagine that their stories and their languages could command a global stage, and they succeeded. This is precisely the mindset that the Honourable Prime Minister called for in his rallying cry at Waves last year. Create in India, create for the world. It’s a dream many of us in the media industry have always nourished, but so far it’s just remained a dream. So why have we not been able to break out of the domestic bounds and achieve a larger mindshare and market share globally? In my view, first and foremost, our big domestic market itself has been a distraction. We can get easily satisfied as long as we are getting attention and business in India.

But our ability to translate our abundant ambition into reality has also been constrained by a few structural factors. Chief among them being the capital constraints. An inability to attract global talent and a target audience largely confined to the domestic audience. The numbers make these constraints stark. The average Hollywood studio production commands a budget of 65 to 100 million dollars. A major tent pole runs up to anything, anything up to 300 or 350 million dollars. The average Indian film, 3 to 5 million dollars. And this is equally true of television production. A single episode of a marquee series in Hollywood can cost up to 20 to 30 million dollars. We can only afford to spend a fraction of that. Because, one, we have the constraint, but two, we are not able to get the capital because our primary market of monetization still remains India.

And as a result, it’s become a spiral and we just cannot compete globally in that race. And this financial ceiling has been set. And this has created a paradox of talent as well. India has some of the finest creative and technical talent anywhere in the world. We have created cutting -edge technology and production capabilities in areas such as VFX that power the world’s biggest productions. But these are all deployed to support Western productions. Our own producers and directors who have the quality and the ambition cannot afford these services because our monetization universe is much more smaller and limited. So when both capital and talent are constrained, the horizon of our content narrows with them. Our films, our television, our music have been made primarily for consumers within the country, or at best, for the diaspora overseas.

There have been some exceptions, but they have been made. There have been just exceptions, not a pattern. The result is a peculiar chicken -and -an -egg problem. Limited capital, much of which owes to our status as a developing economy, and a primarily domestic audience constrain our global competitiveness. That lack of competitiveness in turn hinders our ability to attract the capital that would close the gap. This is not to lament what we have achieved. We have done remarkably well with the limitations and challenges that we had, but the opportunity at hand is much larger, much bigger. AI provides India a once -in -a -generation opportunity to become the creative capital of the world. Not just the back office for the world’s content, but the front office, the producer and deliverer of content globally, the leader, the standard bearer.

Because our business is built on human creativity, the media and entertainment sector is said to be the biggest beneficiary of the AI. This is a catalyst that fundamentally rewires three core pillars on which our entire industry is built. Content, consumer and commerce. On content, for decades, the limitations of infrastructure have been a constraint on the business of media and entertainment. Today, that barrier is coming down rapidly. AI -powered production is not just reducing costs, it is unlocking an unprecedented capacity to produce more and offer more. At Geostar, we recently produced the Mahabharata Ek Dharmayu, the 100 -episode live -action series, which is exhibited right here at the GeoPavilion. We achieved the visual scale and emotional depth of a global production three to five times faster than a traditional pipeline.

The economic efficiencies were significant, too. What this tells me is that the old barriers are vanishing. The only binding constraints that are left are imagination and creativity. And a landscape where imagination determines the winner. And a landscape where imagination determines the winner. India’s formidable cultural depth and inherent DNA for storytelling and entrepreneurship has become our most powerful competitive assets. Our agenda at Geostar is clear, to harness these attributes and position ourselves as the world’s leading foundry for stories and creativity. For consumers, we have an opportunity to retire a model that has been one -directional for a century. We produce, they receive. AI shatters that monologue. It allows us to create experiences that audiences have never had before.

We are opening a new frontier in the viewer relationship, conversational discovery, interactive storytelling, and regionalization that goes beyond simply dubbing the capture, the authentic texture of India’s distinct markets. And finally, commerce. Since the first newspapers, this industry has operated with exactly two monetization models, advertising and subscription. These are two incredibly broad. These are two incredibly blunt levers for a market of 800 million viewers with wildly different economic realities. AI makes genuine consumer segmentation a reality. It enables dynamic pricing and packaging that actually reflect how people live, how they consume, what they consume, and what they can afford. It unlocks entirely new categories of value we haven’t even begun to imagine in the media and entertainment sector.

Taken together, the disruption across the three pillars of content, consumer, and commerce form the very engine of the orange economy that the Honorable Prime Minister talks about. The global media market is nearly $3 trillion today, heading to $3 .5 trillion by 2029. India’s share is currently less than 2%. AI offers us the potential to explore our share in this pie. Even a modest shift in our share of global revenue from 2 % to 4 % or 5 % would represent tens of billions of dollars in new value creation and can be transformational for a large segment of our people. But opportunity and outcome are not the same thing. We need all stakeholders pulling in the same direction. To seize the moment, we need three commitments from everyone.

in this country and in this room. First, disrupt ourselves or be disrupted. I’ve seen this movie before. When we introduced digital newsrooms, senior editors resisted. When streaming arrived, traditional broadcasters looked the other way. The pattern is almost always the same. Incumbents defend the fortress until the walls come down and they are buried under it. We cannot afford the same mistake. Right now, we have an advantage the West does not. The freedom to move. The lack of baggage. Hollywood is approaching AI defensively, paralyzed by legal battles and locked in protectionist reflexes. The incumbents are conflicted and held back by the legacy value that they have accumulated. Luckily, we don’t have such liabilities. We can design the revenue models that actually work for everyone.

The writers, the actors, the technicians, and the producers. This does not have to be a zero -sum game. It is a larger pie and everybody, you must share it. fairly and squarely. We can set the global precedent, but only if we lead with ambition rather than anxiety. Secondly, India must become the global hotbed for AI -native creative talent. The most valuable person in tomorrow’s media industry is not a pure technologist, not a traditional artist. It is a blend of both. Someone who can conceive a world -class story and command the AI tools to bring it to life. We have the deepest creative traditions and the sharpest engineering minds. The task now is to fuse them seamlessly through a relentless focus on skilling and upskilling at scale so that the world looks at India for this exact kind of talent.

And finally, policy must be an accelerator. In this early stage of our growth and ambition, it should not become a break. Our creators do not need a roadmap handed to them. They simply need the obstacles removed. because these are early days. The guardrails we set now will have a massive multiplier effect on our competitiveness in future. As we shape these frameworks, we must resist the temptation to import Western regulatory construct wholesale. Look at China. It’s been very clear -eyed about this. They identified exactly what they needed to outpace the West and build their regulatory approach around that goal. Our frameworks must also reflect our unique ambitions and opportunities. We are sitting in Bharat Mandapam at the first global AI summit hosted in the global south.

This is significant in a way that goes far beyond symbolism. For too long, the intersection of technology and media has been dominated by a handful of countries and companies. The tools were always made elsewhere. The platforms were built elsewhere. The rules were written elsewhere. AI changes that equation forever. Everybody is starting at the same place. as far as application to this sector is concerned. When the barriers across the entire value chain collapse, the advantage may shift decisively. It moves away from those with deepest pockets and towards those with deepest wells of entrepreneurship, creativity, and adoption to technology. And no country on earth is better positioned for that shift than India. The question before us today is not whether India can become the global media powerhouse of the AI age.

It is whether we will move fast enough to claim that position that actually rightfully belongs to us. I believe we will. The energy and the ambition of this country always gives me hope. The stories have always been here. Now the scale of our market and the power of our technology have finally aligned, and the race has just begun. This technology is the ultimate leveler. Let us not just participate in this new era. Let us shape and lead this. Thank you very much. Thank you.