AI Summit: Uday Shankar bets on AI to unlock commerce-led media growth

New Delhi: JioStar vice chairman Uday Shankar said artificial intelligence could help the media industry unlock commerce-led business models beyond the current dependence on subscriptions and advertising, by enabling sharper segmentation, dynamic pricing and packaging, and new value pools.

Speaking at the IndiaAI Impact Summit at Bharat Mandapam on Friday, Shankar argued that the industry serves hundreds of millions of viewers with widely different ability-to-pay, but still relies on two blunt monetisation levers. 

He said AI can make monetisation more granular, and expand the total opportunity for India in a global media market he pegged at nearly $3 trillion, projected to reach $3.5 trillion by 2029. 

India’s share, he said, is under 2 per cent, and even a move to 5 per cent would create “tens of billions of dollars” in value.

He then moved to the constraints that, in his view, have held India back from translating domestic scale into global influence. 

Shankar said India’s break-out has been constrained by lack of capital, difficulty attracting global talent, and an audience focus that remains largely domestic.

He used budget comparisons to underline the gap. A typical Hollywood studio production, he said, runs $65-$100 million, with tentpole films at $150-$300 million. The average Indian film, he said, is $3-$5 million. 

For television, he claimed a marquee HBO or Paramount episode costs $20-$30 million, while a typical Indian TV serial is “seven to ten lakhs per episode”.

That disparity, he argued, creates a paradox. Indian creative and technical talent is world-class and works on global productions, but domestic producers often cannot afford that talent at global rates, narrowing ambition and export readiness.

In his opening remarks, Shankar credited Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “vision and leadership” for placing AI at the centre of India’s growth agenda, and praised IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, MeitY and the IndiaAI team for convening the summit. 

Clarifying that he was not speaking as a technologist, he positioned himself as a media professional who has watched technology repeatedly reset speed and efficiency in newsrooms and media businesses over three decades.

“Big market” is not the same as “global power”

Shankar put India’s media story in scale terms. He said India has moved from a single state broadcaster to over 900 channels across dozens of languages, from about 70 million TV households to over 210 million TV households, and to over 800 million video consumers. 

He added that the media and entertainment sector now contributes more than $30 billion economically, making India the world’s fifth-largest media and entertainment market.

But he argued that scale at home has not translated into mindshare abroad. He contrasted India with countries and cultures that have “captured the global imagination”, citing South Korea’s content exports and Puerto Rico’s global music breakout as examples of smaller markets building worldwide influence.

He tied the gap to the Prime Minister’s “Create in India, create for the world” framing, saying it has remained more a shared ambition than an achieved reality for the industry.

AI as a “once-in-a-generation” opening for media

Shankar framed AI’s impact across three pillars: content, consumer and commerce.

On content, he said AI-powered production is not just cutting costs but enabling higher-quality storytelling at speed. He cited JioStar’s “Mahabharat: Ek Dharmayudh”, a 100-episode live-action series exhibited at the summit, saying it achieved “visual scale and emotional depth” at global standards, three to five times faster than a traditional pipeline.

He argued that if production constraints fall, the binding limits become imagination and creativity, where India’s cultural depth and storytelling tradition can be an advantage.

On consumers, he said AI can shift the relationship from one-way broadcasting to interactive engagement. He pointed to conversational discovery, interactive storytelling, and regionalisation that goes beyond dubbing to reflect the “authentic texture” of distinct Indian markets.

Disrupt, build talent, keep policy enabling

Shankar warned that “opportunity and outcome are not the same thing” and outlined three priorities.

First, he said incumbents must “disrupt ourselves, or be disrupted”, arguing the industry has a history of resisting change, from digital newsrooms to OTT, until disruption becomes unavoidable.

Second, he called for India to become a global hotbed for “AI-native creative talent”, describing the most valuable future worker as a hybrid who can tell world-class stories and command AI tools to build them. He urged skilling and upskilling at scale to fuse creative traditions with engineering capability.

Third, he said policy should act as an accelerator rather than a brake. He urged India not to copy Western regulatory constructs wholesale, and to shape guardrails that reflect India’s ambitions and competitiveness goals.

Move fast

Shankar ended by calling Bharat Mandapam the venue for the first global AI summit hosted in the Global South, and argued AI can change who writes the rules for technology and media. He said the advantage could shift away from deep pockets towards deep culture, dynamic audiences and market scale.

His closing line was a speed test. The question, he said, is not whether India can become a global media powerhouse in the AI age, but whether it will move fast enough to claim that position.