Bharti Airtel and Google are now joining forces to embed Airtel’s AI-powered spam and fraud protection directly into Google’s Rich Communication Services (RCS) messaging platform in India. This makes Airtel the latest Indian telecom operator to adopt RCS – all three major Indian telecom operators – Jio, Airtel, and Vodafone Idea – currently support RCS.
Under the agreement, Airtel’s real-time threat detection—already proven effective against billions of spam calls and messages—will be layered onto Google’s RCS ecosystem, which powers advanced messaging features in the Google Messages app on Android devices. The system will perform stringent checks on business messaging traffic, including sender identity validation using telco-backed business verification, strict enforcement of users’ Do Not Disturb (DND) preferences by categorizing messages as promotional or transactional, blocking of known spam business messages, multi-tiered filtering of malicious domains and links, and throttling of senders jointly flagged by Airtel and Google’s AI-powered spam detection.
This is especially relevant in India – the world’s second-largest internet market remains one of the most spam and fraud-impacted messaging markets globally. This is driven by its massive mobile user base (over 1 billion, as of 2026) and its explosive growth in digital payments during the pandemic and post-pandemic era (UPI transactions exceeded 21.7 billion transactions recorded in January, and amounted to 20.39 billion last month). Basically, by filtering at the network level, Google and Airtel aim to reduce bandwidth waste, improve user trust, and make RCS more competitive against dominant apps like WhatsApp. This means that everyday users gain safer, more trustworthy rich messaging (high-quality media, reactions, business chats) without being bombarded by scams.
“At Airtel, we are obsessed with customer protection and continue to be at the forefront to lead India’s fight against spam. We do this by harnessing data, intelligent networks and relentless innovations so our customers are protected end-to-end. In a pioneering initiative, we have now partnered with Google to extend customer protection beyond the telco domain and made the rich messaging platform safer and more secure. We now call on the broader OTT communication platforms to work with us and make sure that customers are protected from the spam and financial fraud menace,” Gopal Vittal, Executive Vice Chairman of Bharti Airtel, announced in an official statement.
This comes at a time when Airtel reported that its existing AI-driven anti-spam initiatives have blocked more than 71 billion spam calls and 2.9 billion spam SMSes over the last 1.5 years, resulting in a 68.7% reduction in financial losses due to fraud on its network. The company has long argued that while traditional mobile messaging operates under strict telco-grade safeguards and regulatory oversight, many internet-based and standalone messaging apps lack equivalent protections, making them increasingly exploited vectors for sophisticated fraud and invasive spam. The partnership addresses that gap by applying carrier-level accountability to RCS.