Satya Nadella puts Agentic AI front and centre with Microsoft's latest model

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speaking in Bengaluru at the software giant's India AI Tour.

Microsoft chief executive officer Satya Nadella said software development lifecycle (SDLC) is entering a new phase driven by agentic artificial intelligence, as he confirmed the release of a new AI model by the software giant on December 12.

Since the launch of Generative AI at the end of 2022, SDLC has undergone fundamental changes, with some companies writing up to 30 percent of their code using artificial intelligence. Agentic AI represents the next logical evolution, capable of autonomously handling end-to-end SDLC and more, including deployment.

“The classic SDLC has to change to a new form of AI-driven SDLC,” he said in Bengaluru on December 11, adding Microsoft is building a full stack to support this transition — from a stateful Copilot experience across applications to agentic systems embedded throughout the toolchain.

On December 9, Microsoft announced an investment of $17.5 billion in India between 2026 and 2029 to accelerate the country’s cloud and AI infrastructure, skilling and sovereign digital capabilities.

This is the company’s largest investment in Asia and builds on the $3-billion commitment announced in January, which Microsoft said would be spent by the end of 2026.

Speaking in Delhi, the first of his three-city Microsoft AI Tour in India, on December 10, Nadella said that India has engineered a “virtuous cycle” for technology by combining policy, digital public infrastructure, and a large domestic market.

Agentic workflows are becoming central to how developers build, test and deploy software, with GitHub, VS Code and Copilot now supporting multi-agent tasking, mission control views and custom models integrated from Microsoft Foundry.

Nadella showed how developers can delegate coding, reviews, security fixes, planning and reruns of tasks to agents that work autonomously across repositories and the cloud.

Nadella described this shift as a mindset change that requires developers to think first about the end-state they want to influence, with context engineering and new forms of data preparation playing a key role.

He also highlighted activity on Foundry, which now hosts over 11,000 open source and frontier models.

Developers can pull their own fine-tuned models into Copilot and use them directly within GitHub and VS Code, blending general-purpose AI with domain-specific intelligence.

Also read: Labour Ministry signs MoU with Microsoft to boost employment opportunities for India's workforce

Nadella also said Microsoft is deepening its partnerships with Cognizant, Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services and Wipro to accelerate the adoption of agentic AI.

Each of the four companies will deploy more than 50,000 Copilot licences, collectively taking the rollout to above 2,00,000 licences as they embed AI into core workflows.

Also read: Microsoft announces tie-ups with Infosys, TCS, 2 others to accelerate agentic AI

Nadella said India is showing “great momentum” in deploying agentic AI, pointing to examples such as Cognizant’s in-house multi-agent framework, Wipro’s use of data agents in Microsoft Fabric to transform sales and finance processes, and Swiggy’s deployment of real-time data agents across its dark stores and command centre.

“I had the chance to discuss with Prime Minister Modi about how India has uniquely brought together virtuous cycle, policies, programme, technology stack and the Indian market. To some degree, that is magic,” Nadella said.