By-Sunita D
On January 11, when Mukesh Ambani announced that Reliance Jio would launch an AI-
powered Indian language platform, the statement went beyond innovation and entered the
realm of strategic control.
Platforms are not just tools, they are gateways to data, users, labour, culture and commerce.
The ILO, 2025 reveals that the number of digital labor platforms in 2023 grew from 193 in 2010
to more than 1,070, so hence this proves that platform capitalism is no longer a new
phenomenon. These include online platforms that cater online work through a dispersed
workforce and also location-based platforms, which connect workers and clients at specific
locations.
In today’s digital economy, entrepreneurs and investors are no longer racing to sell products
alone, they are racing to build information that others must depend on. Whether it is AI stacks,
platforms promise scale without ownership of assets, shifting content creation, data generation
and even labour onto users while the platform extracts value through monetisation, visibility
control and data extraction. Ambani’s announcement signals that India’s next economic
battleground will be about who owns the pipes through digital life flows.
Platforms launched over the past year
1) Perplexity Comet Ai Browser: Launched in 2025, Perplexity Comet Ai Browser AI-powered
browser embeds summaries, task automation and also conversational AI directly into web
navigation. While positioned as a productivity tool, it functions as infrastructure by sitting
between the Internet and the users it captures attention, search behaviour and data flows that
can be monetised at a larger scale.
2) ATOMESUS AI: An India-based generative AI platform, ATOMUSUS AI, offering text, image
and NLP tools. Users feed data, prompts and usage into the system, while the platform
monetises access, scale and compute it turns participation into recurring revenue without even
producing original content itself.
Why are Platforms merging and integrating so rapidly?
Across media, technology and geographies, the last decade saw a pattern emerging: Platforms
are no longer merely expanding rather they are integrating, absorbing and merging to deepen
control over entire digital ecosystems. What appears as consolidation for efficiency is, in reality,
the rapid expansion of the platform economy.
Facebook, in its early 2010s, was hit by a demographic ceiling. Younger users were migrating to
Instagram’s mobile first, visual ecosystem. Instead of permitting a rival platform to grow
independently, Facebook absorbed Instagram in 2012, ensuring that user attention, social
graphs and data flows remained inside a single ecosystem. The merger allowed Meta to
consolidate behavioral data across platforms, strengthening advertising, tracking and
monetisation.