Microsoft continues to grow and hire talent in India for specific skillsets even as it reorganises globally, Microsoft India & South Asia president Puneet Chandok has said.
In 2025, the tech giant cut its work force in India and globally by around 15,000.
“I'm very confident and responsible that we will continue to build in India, build for the world from India, which basically means investing in areas where customers are asking us to invest in and we see demand,” Chandok told Moneycontrol at India AI Impact Summit in Delhi.
“We're bringing in talent in certain areas where we need skill sets. We're constantly reorganising ourselves and the work structures are changing, and the way we organise work is changing.”
Chandok said India continues be an exciting market for Microsoft, driven by consistent double-digit year-on-year growth. It has also emerged as one of the “fastest growing markets for co-pilot, recording massive demand across sectors”.
Impact of AI on jobs
India brings many opportunities and problems to solve for from a business perspective and that will need specialised talent to work with, he said.
“We have always been short of capacity. If we create capacity, and get people to focus on a lot more value-adding work, I generally think we can do a lot more. I can't comment exactly on how hiring will go up or down, but the type of hiring, the skills that we look for, will definitely change,” he said.
“Even the people who are currently in jobs will need to upskill themselves. You might not be changing jobs, but your job might be changing.”
India roadmap
Microsoft recently made a commitment to invest $17.5 billion between 2026 and 2029 to accelerate the country’s cloud and AI infrastructure, skilling and sovereign digital capabilities.
This is on top of $3 billion investment announced in January 2025.
Chandok said the company is building the “largest data centre, AI infrastructure in the country”. The data centre capacity build-out will happen across four regions, two of which are with Reliance Jio and one with Microsoft’s biggest data centre region in Hyderabad, which is expected to go live by mid-2026.
“One of my goals is how do we accelerate and do that faster for the country, because we've seen the demand, and it's our ability to build faster and execute faster. We will also double down on skilling. We've announced a $20 billion commitment. We'll go deeper into this,” he said.
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