What is happening in India with digital public goods is phenomenal: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella

Satya Nadella at the Microsoft Future Ready Leadership Summit in Bengaluru on January 5.

Microsoft Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Satya Nadella has termed India’s digital public goods infrastructure as “phenomenal” and said the country can lead the world in making the technology and policies work well together for common people.

Addressing the Microsoft Future Ready Technology Summit in Bengaluru on January 5, Nadella said, “It's just unbelievable for me to see the India Stack mature and the use cases between the technology and the policy —  there's nothing like that I see anywhere else in the world and it's fantastic for India to lead and then contribute this back to the world.”

Nadella also sat down for a quick chat with Nandan Nilekani, Infosys co-founder and backer of India Stack.

During their conversation, Nilekani told Nadella that Prime Minister Narendra Modi was a big supporter of digital public goods.

In response, Nadella said that the Prime Minister’s vision as well as the policies and the technology stack co-evolving is "a virtuous cycle that is unlike anything I've seen, and it's just tremendous".

“I absolutely think both of these as perhaps the greatest contributions that India can make to the world. The idea that there is a digital, public good is great. The idea that there is a digital public good is great but there's new ways to use them to make it possible for every society and economy to be more inclusive.

“What is it that I learn every time I come to India?... that it is the common man able to use the greatest technology to do something that is useful to them and it's not tech for tech’s sake. That to me is what India can contribute, which is the age of celebration of technology for technology's sake is over,” the Microsoft CEO said.

Nadella, who is on a four-day India visit, made stops at Mumbai and New Delhi before coming to Bengaluru, the country’s tech hub.

During his visit to Delhi, he met Prime Minister Narendra Modi, external affairs minister S Jaishankar, Electronics and IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw as well as minister of state for electronics and information technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar. He is expected to conclude his trip in Hyderabad.

Nadella also outlined six imperatives which will drive technology-based economic growth in India: migrating to the cloud, unifying data and applying AI models as platforms, empowering fusion teams, re-energising workforce, collaborative business processes and prioritising cybersecurity and privacy.

In his speech, Nadella said that India is building out digital infrastructure as a public good, referring to the country’s National Language Translation Mission as well as Microsoft’s work in the domain.

ChatGPT was also another prime area of interest, but it’s not without cause that Nadella has jumped onto the bandwagon. Microsoft backs OpenAI, the maker of the viral AI chatbot, and the company also uses Azure as its cloud partner.

In Bengaluru, he asked the chatbot to list some popular south Indian tiffins. While it added biryani to this list, he got the AI to admit it was wrong, and then even write a play where idli, dosa and vada argue over who is the best tiffin of them all.

At his Mumbai event, too, Nadella asked the chatbot for recommendations for the best street food in Mumbai (which turned out to be vada pav), and then asked the ChatGPT to even create a play in which the Vada Pav defends its position.