Vodafone Idea (Vi) launched Vi Intelligence, its company-wide artificial intelligence initiative, on 4 November 2026, and partnered with PwC India to set up the Vi Intelligence Lab in Mumbai. The lab will develop, incubate and scale agentic, assistive and responsible AI solutions for Vi’s own operations and for enterprise customers across industries.

Vi said in its official press release that the lab will act as an innovation gateway linking global AI companies, startups, research groups and enterprises to solve real business problems. The move adds a telecom operator to the list of Indian firms building in-house capacity for agentic AI, after Tech Mahindra and Microsoft’s agentic AI platform for telecom earlier this year.

What is the Vi Intelligence Lab?

The Vi Intelligence Lab combines Vi’s digital and network infrastructure with PwC India’s business transformation experience. PwC India will place a dedicated Centre of Excellence team inside Vi’s Mumbai office to work alongside the operator’s technology teams.

According to Vi, the lab will run through five programmes:

• Incubation projects aimed at complex business challenges
• Development of proprietary AI, technology and innovation capabilities
• Vi AI Open hackathons and innovation challenges for global AI startups
• A transformation AI factory to move ideas quickly from experiment to pilot
• AI skilling and capability-building programmes for the workforce

Three pillars: agentic, assistive and responsible AI

The lab is anchored on three pillars: agentic AI, assistive AI, and sovereign and responsible AI. Vi said these will guide solutions across consumer, enterprise and operational use cases, helping businesses move beyond rule-based automation towards increasingly autonomous processes.

Every use case will pass through GRACIE, Vi’s Responsible AI framework, which the company said ensures ethical and secure use of data, intellectual property and AI systems. Governance is becoming a board-level question as agents take on real tasks, a theme also raised in DSCI’s industry guidance on agentic AI liability.

What Vi and PwC India leaders said

Jagbir Singh, Chief Technology Officer, Vi, said telecom has long connected people, businesses and devices, “but the future belongs to intelligence.” He said the lab will help organisations adopt AI “in practical and scalable ways”, from customer engagement and service experience to cross-functional processes.

Vinish Bawa, Partner and Leader, Technology, Media and Telecom (TMT), PwC India, said enterprises moving towards intelligent and autonomous processes will need trusted ecosystems, and that PwC India will bring its experience in agentic transformation to turn AI potential into working capabilities.

Why it matters for enterprise AI in India

Indian telecom operators are being pushed to treat AI as core infrastructure rather than a side project. The sector regulator recently proposed that telecom operators own their AI and report serious failures, which makes a formal responsible AI framework like GRACIE more than a branding exercise.

For CIOs, the lab also signals a shift in how telcos sell to enterprises: from connectivity and cloud, as in Vi’s earlier enterprise cloud partnership with Yotta, towards co-built AI solutions. Similar consulting-led models are emerging elsewhere, such as Straive’s partnership with Anthropic for responsible enterprise AI.

Key takeaways

• Vi launched Vi Intelligence and a Mumbai AI lab with PwC India on 4 November 2026.
• The lab focuses on agentic, assistive, and sovereign and responsible AI for enterprises.
• All use cases will be governed by Vi’s GRACIE Responsible AI framework.

FAQ

Who is Vi’s partner for the Vi Intelligence Lab?

PwC India is Vi’s partner and will set up a dedicated Centre of Excellence team co-located with Vi in Mumbai.

What is GRACIE?

GRACIE is Vi’s Responsible AI framework. Every AI use case built through the lab must pass through it before deployment.

Featured image: Vi Intelligence brand logo. Image: Vodafone Idea (press handout).

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