Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella shares six imperatives to drive economic growth through technology in India

Satya Nadella listed-cloud and AI as imperatives that can be helpful in driving economic growth.

By 2025, most applications will be built on cloud-native infrastructure, and nearly 90% of digital workloads will be deployed on cloud-native platforms, said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on January 3 as he highlighted the future of cloud and artificial intelligence, as well as the six imperatives that will drive technology-based economic growth in India.

Nadella was speaking at the Microsoft Future Ready Leadership Summit in Mumbai.

“Cloud is 70-80% energy efficient on workload. You hedge against demand cycle, you consume it only when you need it. We are investing in 60-plus regions, 200 plus data centres worldwide. In India alone, we are expanding and setting our fourth region in Hyderabad. We want to make cloud available everywhere,” Nadella said.

He added that every factory, retail store, warehouse, and hospital will require distributed computing to generate data.

Nadella also used the example of the ChatGPT chatbot, which has recently gained notoriety, to illustrate what AI is actually capable of in terms of "unifying data and applying AI models as platforms."

“You see the emergence of a new reasoning engine with AI. This reasoning engine will be debated over for the displacement it may cause or responsible usage. Those are real considerations. But it can augment everyone in whatever they are doing. Knowledge workers will be able to be more creative and frontline workers could do more knowledge work. It’s like having this co-pilot with you throughout. AI is ultimately going to accelerate human creativity, ingenuity and productivity across a range of tasks,” he said.

Nadella explained how empowering fusion teams could enable growth. A scenario where professional software developers and frontline domain experts come together to build these systems will create magic, he said.

“When the frontline domain expert of one of your branches, retail outlets, warehouses is participating in digital transformation, that’s when transformation is in high gear. So participating in apps building by low code-no code will bring a big change,” he said.

By 2025, he expects 70% of apps will be built through low code-no code.

The fourth imperative, he said, is re-energising the workforce. According to him, there is a productivity paranoia in which leaders and managers believe employees are not productive when, in fact, they are becoming burned out. He believes that data can bridge the gap.

“Conducting soft skilling, and during meetings everyone’s voice should be heard. People value upgrading skills and this is critical for building loyalty,” he said.

The fifth imperative is that business processes will be more collaborative in nature. For example, using "industrial metaverse" by creating digital twins to manage and improve operations and efficiencies.

The ultimate imperative is cybersecurity and privacy. Companies must adopt a zero-trust approach, with cybersecurity integrated into the infrastructure rather than added later when a threat arises.