Jio Haptik targets two million UAE small businesses with SOLO launch

Jio Haptik wants to put an AI business team in the hands of more than two million solopreneurs and small businesses over the next two years. The Reliance Jio company launched its SOLO platform in the UAE on 31 October, announcing the rollout at the Dubai AI Festival.

SOLO is pitched as an "AI Business Team" — software that handles marketing, sales and customer support for people who can't afford to hire humans to do those jobs. It's available now on both Android and iOS.

Why the UAE, and why now?

Small and medium-sized enterprises make up roughly 95% of all businesses in the country, according to figures cited in the announcement. That's the pool Jio Haptik is fishing in. Most of those entrepreneurs juggle lead generation, content creation and customer replies alongside whatever they actually set out to sell.

The launch also lines up with national policy. CEO Ahshad Jussawalla tied the move directly to government strategy, saying the UAE is "an important market for us as we work to make AI more accessible to businesses of all sizes, in line with the broader ambitions of the UAE's AI Strategy 2031."

Jussawalla framed the product as more than an efficiency tool. "The opportunity with AI is not just to help businesses become more efficient, but to rethink what a small team can achieve," he said. "An entrepreneur should not have to choose between growing the business and keeping up with the everyday work that growth demands."

What do you actually get?

SOLO ships with two named AI teammates, each with a defined brief:

• Tara — handles marketing, including creating promotional content.
• Ved — covers sales and customer support, responding to enquiries, chasing potential leads and managing conversations.

Both work across channels where UAE small businesses already live, specifically WhatsApp and Instagram. The pitch is simple: offload the recurring busywork to software, and spend the freed-up hours on customers, strategy and growth. In practical terms, that means an owner running a shop or a consultancy could have AI drafting posts, answering routine messages and following up on leads while they focus on delivery.

From India to the Gulf

SOLO isn't starting from zero. The platform built its initial momentum in India before this week's UAE debut, and Jio Haptik says the Dubai launch is a deliberate step in taking AI-powered business support across markets. The company plans to explore additional languages and geographies as the platform evolves — language support being the obvious gate for any wider Middle East or North Africa push.

For context on the seller: Jio Haptik is a global provider of agentic AI-powered customer experience solutions and sits within Reliance Jio, one of India's largest telecom and technology groups. SOLO represents a move downmarket from its core enterprise CX business — selling to individuals and small firms rather than large customer-experience operations.

What does this change for small operators?

The honest answer: pricing power. Capabilities that once required a marketing freelancer, a salesperson or a support agent are now bundled into a downloadable app, which puts pressure on the freelancers and agencies serving the same segment. For a two-person business, the calculus shifts from "can we afford help" to "which AI do we plug in." Two million users in two years is an ambitious target, but with SMEs forming 95% of the UAE's business base, the addressable market is there. The open question — unanswered in the launch materials — is adoption cost and whether small operators trust AI enough to let it talk to their customers directly.