India tops global active users for AI apps; telcos to monetise: BofA report

BofA said India leads the world in daily and monthly active users for AI apps, giving Jio and Airtel scope to lift data usage, ARPUs and upsell personalised offerings through bundles

Indian telecom service providers (TSPs) Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel will be ramping up usage of artificial intelligence (AI) or large language model (LLM) apps to boost monetisation opportunities.

 

These would come from higher data consumption by users and upselling personalised products, as the country becomes the world’s largest market for these apps by active number of users.

 

According to a Bank of America Securities (BofA) report on Wednesday, apps like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Perplexity have a large chunk of their users coming from India. The country, in fact, has the highest number of daily and monthly active users. (See chart) 

“We find Indian telcos like Bharti and Jio (subsidiary of RIL) well placed to increase user stickiness and benefit from AI scale-up in the medium term,” the brokerage said.

 

It added that the rising data adoption was leading to higher average revenue per user (ARPU), a quarterly metric showing profitability of a carrier. ARPU for Jio and Airtel were at ₹211.4 and ₹256, respectively, as of September 2025.  

 

“There’s room to upsell and offer personalised targeted offerings in future and collaboration opportunities in data centres and the enterprise space with global entities,” the brokerage said.

 

The upward projections by BofA are backed by tailwinds for the Indian market, including the sheer size of 700-750 million mobile user base. Also, there is a larger pool of young English-speaking people that has access to affordable data, thereby consuming 20-30 GB of data at $2 a month. 

 

 “The adoption is further accelerated as telcos like Jio/Bharti are offering complimentary subscription of paid versions of Gemini/Perplexity respectively,” the brokerage added. Over 2025, telcos bundled offers with AI apps. 

 

Jio offers a Pro plan of Google Gemini worth ₹35,100 free for 18 months for all Jio 5G users. The offer also includes 2TB storage on Google One, Veo 3.1 AI video tool, NotebookLM, Google Workspace and Nano Banana.  

 

Bharti Airtel offers 12-month Perplexity Pro worth ₹17,000 free to all active users across prepaid, postpaid, broadband and direct-to-home. 

 

The brokerage added that given the adoption of LLMs in India, the country can serve as an ideal test bed for agentic AI apps built on the top of LLMs that can reason, plan and execute tasks independently.