Bharti Airtel Sunday said it will set up a digital technology hub in Pune, its fourth in the country, and will employ 500 people, as the telco pivots to becoming a digital services company.

"Airtel is rapidly scaling up its in-house digital talent pool to support its transformation into a digital telco. Pune being an established IT and tech hub, makes it an obvious choice for Airtel to tap into the talent pool and also drive cross-industry collaboration," Pradipt Kapoor, chief information officer, Bharti Airtel said in a statement.

This will be Airtel’s fourth digital technology hub in India and first in the Western region to support its transition to a digital services company, as 5G services are on the horizon, the company said in a statement.

The 5G spectrum aucitions are slated to take place in June-July this year, and 5G services are expected to rollout by the end of the year.

The Pune facility will employ 500 digital engineers including professionals with expertise across multiple experience and domains – Big Data, Machine Learning, Dev Ops, Tech ops, etc. The existing three facilities in Gurgaon, Bengaluru (Airtel X-Labs) and Noida employ close to 3000 people.

The company said that it has made investments worth more than $46 billion in the last couple of decades to create digital infrastructure over which 40% of India’s economic and digital activity takes place.

Currently, Airtel’s digital assets include offerings like Airtel Thanks app, Wynk Music app, Airtel Xstream content platform which the teleco says accrue over 180 million MAUs (monthly active users).

These have been fully developed by its in-house digital engineering teams.

Besides this, Airtel’s digital offerings also include C-PaaS solution Airtel IQ and Ad-tech platform Airtel Ads along with Airtel IoT.