Uday Shankar on AI and India’s media future

Artificial intelligence could help India move from being a large domestic media market to a global content leader, according to Uday Shankar, Vice Chairman of JioStar, who addressed the IndiaAI Impact Summit this week.

Shankar argued that while India’s media and entertainment sector has grown rapidly over the past 25 years, structural constraints have limited its global influence. He said AI presents a rare opportunity to overcome those barriers, provided industry and policymakers act decisively.

A Rapid Domestic Transformation

India’s media industry has expanded from a modest, largely state-led ecosystem into one of the world’s largest markets. Television households have grown into the hundreds of millions, and digital video consumption now reaches a vast national audience. The sector contributes over USD 30 billion to the economy and hosts more than 900 television channels across multiple languages.

Shankar said this transformation was made possible by early and sustained adoption of new technologies. Reflecting on his three decades in media, he noted that each technological shift, from digitised newsrooms to streaming platforms,reshaped how companies operated and how audiences engaged with content.

“AI marks a transformative shift for the media and entertainment industry,” he said. “It fundamentally disrupts every aspect of the value chain, from conceptualisation and production to discovery and monetisation.”

Despite this domestic success, he acknowledged that India has not yet become a consistent global content exporter.

Structural Barriers to Global Scale

Shankar identified three principal constraints: limited access to large-scale capital, difficulty attracting and retaining global talent at competitive rates, and a primary focus on domestic audiences.

He contrasted Indian production budgets with those in Hollywood, where major films can cost upwards of $100 million and marquee television series command tens of millions per episode. By comparison, most Indian productions operate on far smaller budgets. This gap, he argued, restricts global competitiveness, even though Indian creative and technical professionals contribute to international projects in areas such as visual effects.

The result, he said, has been a cycle in which limited global reach reduces access to capital, and limited capital constrains the ability to produce content for global audiences.

AI as a Structural Shift

Shankar described artificial intelligence as a potential inflection point capable of reshaping three pillars of the industry: content, consumer engagement and commerce.

In content creation, AI-driven tools can reduce production costs and timelines, lowering infrastructure barriers that have historically limited scale. He cited recent large-scale productions developed using AI-supported workflows, which enabled faster turnaround without compromising visual ambition.

“The old barriers are vanishing,” he said, arguing that imagination and creativity will increasingly determine success as technology levels the production field.

In consumer engagement, he suggested AI can move media beyond a one-directional model. Instead of audiences passively consuming content, AI-driven systems can enable conversational discovery, interactive storytelling and deeper localisation across India’s diverse linguistic and cultural markets.

“Traditionally, entertainment has been a one-way experience,” Shankar said. “AI changes that dynamic.”

On the commercial side, he noted that the industry has long relied on two primary revenue streams: subscriptions and advertising. AI, he argued, enables more refined consumer segmentation, dynamic pricing and new forms of value creation tailored to varied economic realities within India’s large audience base.

A Window of Opportunity

While global media remains dominated by established markets, Shankar suggested that AI could shift competitive advantage towards countries with scale, cultural depth and technological capability.

India’s share of the global media market remains small relative to its population and creative output. However, even modest gains in global market share could translate into significant economic value.

Shankar cautioned that realising this potential will require coordinated action. Industry leaders must be willing to disrupt their own models rather than resist change. Education and training systems must foster hybrid talent capable of combining storytelling with technological fluency. Policymakers, meanwhile, should create enabling frameworks that support innovation without imposing unnecessary constraints.

“We have the chance to build the definitive business framework for AI-driven entertainment,” he said. “But only if we lead with ambition rather than anxiety.”

As AI adoption accelerates worldwide, Shankar concluded that the question is not whether India has the cultural or creative capacity to compete globally, but whether it can move quickly enough to translate technological opportunity into sustained international impact.