India must close trade deals, build AI to leverage Goldilocks moment, says Sunil Mittal

India is at a “Goldilocks moment” and must seize it to close long-pending trade deals, accelerate infrastructure investment, and build domestic AI and digital capabilities to secure long-term economic gains, Bharti Enterprises chairman and founder Sunil Mittal said on Friday.

Speaking at the HT Leadership Summit in New Delhi, Mittal said, “It is a Goldilocks moment. Currently, growth is positive. India’s work ethic is excellent; enough is going on in this country for us to get to that 2047 vision of being one of the most important economic countries in the world.”

Global partners, he added, now see India “on equal terms”. “We have a leader who wants India to be the Viksit Bharat. He wants us to be successful. What more can we ask for?”

Banking on this optimism, Mittal urged policymakers to speed up reforms. “India must close all its trade deals, then open the opportunities for our country, and invest absolutely heavily into infrastructure. Ease of doing business is very important,” he said, warning that unfinished negotiations and bottlenecks could slow India’s growth trajectory.

“India has tremendous amount of animal spirits, which, if they are unshackled, can create dramatic improvements in our country,” he said.

Tapping technology

Mittal said that the next wave of global innovation will be shaped by AI-driven sensing networks capable of continuously interpreting the physical world. “It’s going to be seeing everything. It’s going to be listening to everything, and it’s going to be seeing your own body rhythm. That is where this world is going,” he said.

To prepare for this shift, he stressed that India must build its own AI and digital backbone instead of depending entirely on foreign hyperscalers.

“You have to build a massive amount of AI compute capacity in the country, you have to build AI data centres. You have to have your own cloud,” Mittal said.

Sensitive workloads such as banking, defence and government services, he warned, cannot rely solely on foreign clouds like Google Cloud, Microsoft or Amazon. “You will need to have a sovereign cloud.”

Scaling infra

As part of this push, Mittal said Airtel is scaling its digital infrastructure and already has 250 MW of operational data-centre capacity. The company is expanding further, including a new 300 MW facility in Andhra Pradesh being developed with an international partner.

He also pointed to Airtel’s recent strategic collaboration. Airtel partnered with Perplexity Pro to offer free AI tools to its entire user base, a move aimed at democratizing advanced AI access across India.

Under the tie-up, all of Airtel’s roughly 360 million customers across mobile, WiFi and DTH services get 12 months of free access to Perplexity Pro, a service normally priced at around ₹17,000 per year.

Perplexity Pro is described as an “AI-powered search and answer engine” that delivers real-time, deeply researched and conversational answers instead of just listing web links. It offers enhanced capabilities such as access to advanced AI models (including GPT-4.1 and Claude), the ability to upload and analyze documents, generate images, and conduct up to 300 “Pro” searches per day.

This, Mittal implied, is part of Airtel’s broader strategy to stay ahead in the AI-first future, not just as a telecom operator, but as a digital-infrastructure company capable of delivering AI and cloud services domestically rather than simply consuming global AI products.

Mittal also underscored the importance of low-earth-orbit (LEO) satellite constellations, noting that Bharti-backed OneWeb had been early in the LEO race before Elon Musk’s Starlink rapidly scaled up.

“OneWeb was actually ahead of even Starlink. But then came Elon Musk putting up thousands of satellites and the game changed completely,” he said. With LEO systems orbiting just a few hundred kilometres above Earth, “these become like cell towers in space,” Mittal said, adding that telecom companies risk “missing a critical area of defence” if they fail to adapt.

Reflecting on the past, Mittal recalled Airtel’s survival through India’s telecom battles. “I wouldn’t call it players. I’ll call it a player — 2002–2003 was our first encounter. Difficult. The question was not if, the question was, when will we be shut down,” he said.

A second existential moment came in 2016, when Reliance Jio Infocomm (Jio) entered the market with sharply reduced data tariffs, triggering widespread bill shocks and forcing incumbent telcos to slash prices.

“Eight, nine players just completely got destroyed; I think we stood firm,” he said. Airtel endured, he added, because of its people. “If your people are motivated, if they are inspired, if they are charged up, it doesn't matter who they are fighting, they can do great things.”

Mittal said Airtel’s resilience extended to Africa, where the company took a bold bet. “It was a big, bold bet, a place we didn’t know very well. The first 7, 8, 9 years were really very bad. It was like a shock,” he admitted. But after a decade of hardship, Airtel Africa has emerged as a $15-billion entity and one of the continent’s leading telecom players.

The billion user target

Looking ahead, Mittal set out an ambitious target: to make Airtel the world’s first telecom company with one billion users, up from about 600 million today. “Let’s say these 8–10 years — that should be the dream: that a company rooted in India can be the foremost telecom, digital connectivity MNC the world has ever seen.”

The optimism is backed by strong financials. As of September 2025, Bharti Airtel had 364 million wireless customers in India, up from 351 million a year earlier. Revenue for the September quarter rose 25.7% year-on-year to ₹52,145 crore, driven by growth in both its India mobile business and Airtel Africa. Net profit surged 89% to ₹6,792 crore.

Airtel also continues to lead the industry on average revenue per user (ARPU), a key profitability yardstick. Airtel, which has an industry-leading ARPU of ₹256 per month, saw a 2.4% sequential increase compared to Jio’s 1.2% growth, which took its ARPU to ₹211.4 at the end of the September quarter.

ARPU remains a key profitability metric for telecom operators, especially as the sector continues to grapple with legacy issues such as adjusted gross revenue (AGR) dues. The Supreme Court recently allowed the government to extend relief to Vodafone Idea on AGR liabilities up to 2016–17.