New tech spend coming in from companies who were not big on digitisation previously: Microsoft’s Anant Maheshwari

Microsoft India President Anant Maheshwari

While a contraction in tech spends is being a seen as a major headwind for the technology industry, Microsoft India President Anant Maheshwari told Moneycontrol in an interview that new tech spending is still coming in from companies that are not yet big on digitisation or the work they were doing in cloud, data or artificial intelligence (AI).

“They are really coming in faster because it helps them variabilise their spend overall in the market and the economy that we have. Then, there were companies that were already very big in terms of their footprint on technology. I think those companies are taking a little bit of a pause, optimising, but they're still continuing to grow in many new areas,” he said.

When asked about cloud as a growth driver in the face of concerns about slowing growth velocity, Maheshwari stated that cloud is on a unitary growth path.

“If you really look at how much of the total data and infrastructure on the planet is on the cloud, it's still a minority percentage. There's a lot more surface to cover for driving a lot of the growth, and then there's a lot more new innovation that is coming which is born in the cloud. I would imagine that for the next few years, it will remain a constant growth rate,” he said, adding that the trendline will continue, but growth will vary in different verticals.

One sector where growth is being seen in India, he said, is in the banking and financial services sector.

However, the slowdown in tech is perhaps most visible as several large companies undertake a series of layoffs as part of cost-cutting measures, including Microsoft, which is laying off 5% of its global workforce — approximately 10,000 people.

Maheshwari said that the world is going through an adjustment.

“Over the last two years, there was a lot of business optimism that was built in everybody was building for the future, everybody was hiring for the future. At the same time, there was also the big, big wave of the great resignation. So I think there were two trends that were creating a lot more hiring. All of that has taken a pause, especially with the inflation that is there in most parts of the planet, the recession that some parts of the planet are seeing,” he said.

He added that, while he sees this as a pause, tech remains a key area of investment in the long term.

“We still see a lot of good demand coming for new tech, workloads and innovation cases, from a lot of companies both from the companies (who already were on it, they are in fact optimizing and investing more), and a lot of new companies are coming in to build new cases,” he said.

Generative AI

ChatGPT may have captivated people’s imaginations, and Microsoft took a punt by investing $10 billion in ChatGPT maker OpenAI. Maheshwari said that generative AI is creating innovation, and is only the start of an era.

“I would imagine that generative AI will show up in almost every one of our workplaces as a co-pilot, it is something that can help us do our work better. It has already shown up, for example, in our Viva sales application where the salespeople can understand how to use some of the data, that they can harness to work together. I’m sure many of the platforms that we will use will have that inbuilt as a tool,” he said.

From Microsoft’s perspective, he said there is interest from Indian clients as well, and companies are trying to figure out how to use ChatGPT in their applications.

“My sense is people will start leveraging their own corporate data and create enterprise use cases going forward,” he said.

Speaking on concerns surrounding ethics in AI, Maheshwari said it is essential that work on data and AI is built on trust, fairness, and ethically.

“I also believe that at least in India, we have a good set of regulations shaping up, which encourages that we also have digital public goods, which have a constant layer built in into some of the data that we work with. So my sense is, there are enough people thinking about it, enough people doing it, but it's everyone's responsibility. Anybody who's coding, anybody who's architecting, it's important to think about trust first,” he said.