Mukesh Ambani says Reliance aiming to become a deep-tech and advanced manufacturing company

Mukesh Ambani, Chairman of Reliance Industries, shared a bold vision of the future of the company during an interview to McKinsey and Company's Leading Asia series on June 25, and said the group intends to become a deep-tech and advanced manufacturing company.

Underscoring the changing technological landscape of the world, Ambani said the key challenge for the next generation will be in succeeding in this new order. "The fact that the technology landscape is changing at an exponential speed is self-evident. I think that the big challenge will be in the confidence of the next generation to succeed in this new landscape," Mukesh Ambani said in the interview published on June 25.

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This ambition for deep-tech began with the telecom foray, said Ambani, when Jio launched 5G in 2021, building every aspect of the service within the company. "We built everything ourselves, end to end—the core, the hardware, the software, every single piece. We used Ericsson and Nokia to help us on 20 percent, just to make sure that the 80 percent that we put in was good," Ambani told McKinsey. The leader of one of India’s largest and most profitable private company had told his team to be 'better than these guys', while staying humble. "I also wanted to make sure that our people were not too full of themselves." The technological ability of Jio helped the company offer unique services in the market.

This desire to develop technology stemmed from the era when the landscape was subjected to a lot of licences for the technology that Reliance needed. "When we grew up, we were the users of technology, and it was clear that we had to license technology from abroad to ensure high quality. But we were subjugated to so many licenses. It was also high risk because, at the end of the day, if a plan didn’t work, you could lose your shirt," said Ambani. He encouraged his leadership to be 'owners of technology' to become innovators.

Reliance has set its purpose in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) game by choosing to develop things that are 'downstream' and avoid the high-risk GPU game, he added. "Our big purpose is to solve the complex problems before society and create wealth for the nation and the people. For this, we need not go into the high-risk GPU game. Let’s do everything downstream," Mukesh Ambani told McKinsey.Disclosure: Moneycontrol is a part of the Network18 group. Network18 is controlled by Independent Media Trust, of which Reliance Industries is the sole beneficiary.