Airtel Beats Jio to AI Chatbot Punch with Perplexity Tie-Up

Telecom operator Bharti Airtel on Thursday announced a strategic partnership with AI‑powered search platform Perplexity to offer its premium Perplexity Pro subscription for free.

Normally priced at Rs 17,000 per year, Perplexity Pro will be available at no cost to around 360 million Airtel customers for one year.

The move positions Airtel as the first Indian telecom operator to bundle a Gen‑AI service with its connectivity plans, spanning mobile, broadband and DTH users.

Under the agreement, every Airtel subscriber will gain uninterrupted access to Perplexity Pro’s advanced features, including AI‑driven summaries, real‑time question‑answering and task automation at no additional cost.

Airtel Vice Chairman and Managing Director Gopal Vittal described the collaboration as “game‑changing,” adding that it will empower millions of customers to “navigate emerging digital trends with confidence and ease.”

The partnership with Perplexity comes amid a fierce battle for market share with Reliance Jio. Recent media reports speculated that Jio might team up with OpenAI to distribute ChatGPT, but no official announcement has been made by either party.

Perplexity Pro Features

Perplexity’s free Pro tier offers capabilities such as multimodal search, AI agents to automate routine workflows and enterprise‑grade data privacy protections.

Perplexity Pro offers unlimited daily searches, access to cutting‑edge AI models like GPT‑4.1 and Claude, deep research and analysis tools, file uploads for document‑based answers, image generation and entry to Perplexity Labs for experimenting with new AI ideas.

Airtel users can claim a free Perplexity Pro subscription through the Airtel Thanks app, bringing powerful, professional‑grade AI to students, professionals, homemakers and travellers alike at no extra cost. “This partnership is an exciting way to make accurate, trustworthy and professional‑grade AI accessible to more people in India, whether a student, working professional or managing a household,” said Aravind Srinivas, co‑founder and CEO of Perplexity.

By leveraging Airtel’s extensive reach, the startup expects to introduce generative‑AI tools to a mass audience, accelerating mainstream adoption at a critical juncture for India’s digital economy.

As of May 2025, Airtel reported 390 million wireless subscribers, gaining 275,000 net additions in May compared with Jio’s 472 million users and 2.7 million net adds, underscoring Airtel’s push to enhance its value proposition and curb subscriber churn.

This first‑of‑its‑kind Gen‑AI partnership highlights both companies’ ambitions: Airtel to differentiate its services in an increasingly commoditised market and Perplexity to expand its user base beyond its existing premium subscribers. With the one‑year trial kicking off immediately, Airtel customers can register through the My Airtel app to activate Perplexity Pro access.

Reliance Jio‑OpenAI Partnership

OpenAI and Meta Platforms had each held separate talks with Reliance Industries about potential partnerships to broaden their AI offerings in India, The Information reported.

As per reports, one possibility involved Reliance Jio distributing ChatGPT. OpenAI even considered cutting its ChatGPT subscription price to just a few dollars a month instead of $20, though it was unclear if that idea had been floated with Reliance.

Reliance also explored selling OpenAI’s models to its enterprise customers via an API and discussed hosting and running both Meta’s and OpenAI’s models locally, keeping Indian customer data within the country, particularly in a planned three‑gigawatt data centre in Jamnagar, Gujarat, which it claimed would be the world’s largest.