Telcos Have a New Monetisation Avenue with Prepaid Plans

The Indian telecom operators are looking for ways to boost their ARPU (average revenue per user) by exploring new monetisation avenues. The telcos including Airtel and Jio have partnered with tech companies to bundle AI (artificial intelligence) subscriptions for their customers. Airtel is offering free access to Perplexity Pro while Jio is offering free access to Gemini Pro. BofA (Bank of America) believes that the rapid surge of AI usage in India is opening up new opportunities for the telcos to offer AI services with data plans, premium subscriptions and enterprise offerings.

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BofA said that India has emerged as the world’s largest market in terms of active users for AI apps and services. This is fueled by cheap data and access to smartphones across the nation. There’s a rapid proliferation of image and video generators, AI chatbots, and productivity tools in the country.

This presents the telcos with an opportunity to bundle AI services and chatbot subscriptions with their plans. At present, the telcos are offering the subscriptions for free to entice users. In the future, these subscriptions could come at a cost and only with select prepaid plans. The best AI bundling is done by Jio wherein the customers are getting 18 months of free Google Gemini AI Pro subscription. This subscription is worth Rs 1,950 and will give users 2TB of cloud storage along with access to Google’s best AI model till date – Gemini 3 Pro.

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With the AI subscriptions and more bundlings in the future, the telcos can potentially improve their ARPU and margins on the business. At present, the free 5G is also something which could be monetised in the future by the telcos, further improving their ARPU. Drop your thoughts in the comments section below.