Mukesh Ambani is selling optimism again. It’s his best product, usually bundled with a 5G data plan and a side of nationalistic fervor. At the latest AI Impact Summit, the chairman of Reliance Industries took the stage to perform a familiar ritual: telling us the robots aren't coming for our paychecks. Instead, he claims AI will be the greatest job creator since the invention of the weekend.

It’s a bold pitch. It’s also exactly what you’d expect from a man who spent the last decade turning India’s telecom sector into a personal fiefdom. Ambani’s argument is simple. He thinks AI won't eat jobs; it’ll create "new opportunities." It’s the kind of line that plays well in a ballroom full of CEOs, but it feels a bit thinner when you're standing on a street corner in Mumbai or Bengaluru.

Let’s be real. We’ve heard this story before. Every time a new piece of software threatens to make human labor obsolete, the architects of that software promise a golden age of "upskilling." They tell us that while the boring, repetitive tasks will vanish, we’ll all be liberated to do more creative, high-value work. They never mention that there are only so many "high-value" seats at the table.

Ambani’s vision for India is a "Smarter India," powered by a massive rollout of AI infrastructure. He’s doubling down on the idea that data is the new oil—a metaphor he’s beaten to death over the years. But oil requires a massive workforce to refine and transport. AI? AI is designed specifically to shrink the headcount.

Look at the friction points. Right now, India’s IT sector is built on the backs of millions of junior developers and BPO workers who perform the digital equivalent of digging ditches. They debug code, they answer customer service tickets, and they process basic data. These are the exact roles currently being devoured by LLMs. When Ambani talks about "new opportunities," he isn't talking about the guy in the call center keeping his job. He’s talking about a tiny fraction of elite engineers building the models that replace that guy.

There’s a massive price tag attached to this dream, too. Ambani is currently cozying up to Nvidia’s Jensen Huang to secure the H100 chips necessary to build India’s sovereign AI. We’re talking about billions of dollars in hardware spend. You don’t drop that kind of cash just to keep your payroll costs the same. You do it to automate. The trade-off is efficiency for the conglomerate at the expense of stability for the clerk.

Reliance has a history of this. When Jio launched, it "democratized" data, sure. It also gutted the competition and centralized the entire digital nervous system of a country under one roof. Ambani’s version of AI job creation looks a lot like his version of telecom: a massive, centralized engine that works beautifully for the shareholders but leaves everyone else scrambling to figure out where they fit in the new hierarchy.

The rhetoric at the summit was carefully scrubbed of any mention of displacement. Ambani spoke about AI as a "partner" to human intelligence. It sounds nice. It sounds like a buddy-cop movie. But in the corporate world, a partner that doesn't need a pension, a lunch break, or a salary isn't a partner. It’s a replacement.

He’s betting on the idea that the sheer scale of India will absorb the shocks. If you connect a billion people to the internet, surely they’ll find something to do, right? But the "new opportunities" being touted—AI auditors, prompt engineers, data governors—require a level of specialized education that doesn't just happen overnight because a billionaire gave a speech.

We’re being asked to trust that the transition will be smooth. We’re told that for every thousand coding jobs that disappear, a thousand "AI orchestrator" jobs will magically appear in their place. The math doesn't check out. It never does. Automation has always been a game of consolidation, moving power from the many who do the work to the few who own the machines.

Ambani’s performance was a masterclass in corporate reassurance. He’s a man who knows how to frame a massive shift in capital as a win for the common man. But as the servers start humming and the algorithms start trimming the fat from corporate budgets, that "new opportunity" might look a lot like a pink slip with a high-tech font.

The real question isn't whether AI will create new types of work. It will. The question is how many people will actually be invited to do it, and how much Reliance will charge them for the privilege.

If the future is as bright as Ambani says, why does it feel like we’re all being asked to cheer for our own obsolescence?